South African Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization

If you want to find something in South Africa using South African search engines a couple of immediate problems arise ...

• The size of the web in South Africa is tiny and as such there is not much to find anyway

• No shopping comparison search engines exist for example to drive interest in the web

• The sophistication of website designers in terms of search engine optimization is almost zero (let me make this point VERY clear lest the heavens fall on my head ... I'm not talking of website appearance at all). This means that great looking websites with great content will just never get found on any South African search engine for very practical and real reasons.

• If you would like to contest this statement please refer to the letter I wrote to a national newspaper in 2004 after the Futurex exhibition based upon some research on South African Websites.

• We're quite simply 4 to 5 years behind the USA and many other countries in almost every respect

These are the important South African search engines ...

• Ananzi

• Aardvark

• Google.co.za

You'll probably notice if you do the same search on Aardvark and Google.co.za that the results are the same. This is not really useful if you already accept that the South African search engine space is small here. Essentially therefore there are only 2 well known competitors namely Ananzi and Google.co.za

There is a quick and easy way to get into the Ananzi South African search engine (but ONLY if you're site is based in or concerns South Africa) and that is to fill in the simple submission form. It takes about a week normally to get indexed.

To get into Google used to be a mission but is now very easy and very quick by using the Google XML sitemap system that Google itself introduced in May 2005. Unfortunately you need to be able to complete specially formatted sitemaps which is beyond the capability of most marketers and designers (that includes me). It's why we use Rapid Sitemaps to do this job for us.

The fact that we are so far behind makes it even more important that aspirant internet marketers get on board the right bus now. Failure to make the right search engine and internet marketing decisions quickly is going to result in market share losses for many traditional businesses in the country. And this lost market share will not be obvious. Read the article about Walmart hiding in South Africa