Getting yourself found above the search engine clutter is an interesting feat.  A whole industry of search engine optimization exists to help you rise above the noise.  SnapEng so far seems to have faired well in the googolplex without any special tricks of the trade.  This seems to be based on three lucky hunches and the unexpected help from a host of app catalog sites.

The first hunch was to create a name, a tag that was unique and unexploited as a URL address.  SnapEng did not show up in searches of existing sites so it was ripe to be taken as a little piece of internet real estate.  The tag does not compete with other sites because they simply do not contain the word.  On the other hand, it is still pronounceable and has some meaning in the context of the apps it hosts.

The second hunch was to include this tag in the overall name of the app.  The hope was to create a family of apps that all share a common element in their name.  This could create some brand recognition.  It could also stake out a little title territory in the app store.  And if the tag showed up where ever the app got mentioned, all the better.

The third hunch was make the app name long and meaningful.  SnapEng F Effort Profiler is a mouthful, but it puts all the important keywords in one title that keeps get replicated in each location that talks about the app.  The app store, the app store catalog sites and the SnapEng site all contain the same name, with the main keywords in a simple list that also serve as the app title.  This results in a concentration of search words.

The unexpected help came in the form of the many app cataloging sites.  Having sites with reasonable search engine ranking point at your site seems to make all the difference in getting your site onto the first page of the search engine results.  The official app store started pointing at the SnapEng F Effort Profiler app on a Thursday.  Within a day, the search results started to get better for SnapEng, but searching for "effort profiler" still produced estimation tools, sport stats and criminology.

None of these sites really integrated these two terms.  Rather, some sites were focused on "effort" while others were focused on "profiling".  This left an opening for the snapeng.ca site, where the terms efforts and profiler are specifically related.  But with only the app store linking into snapping.ca, it was still buried deep in the search results.

Within a few more days, third-party sites that catalog apps harvested the app store listings and then linked to snapeng.ca.  By Monday, searching for "effort profiler" produced links relating to snapeng.ca in the top three results.  Anyone of these links led to the SnapEng F Effort Profiler app, either directly through the app store or through the snapeng.ca site.  Having these more established sites all point to snapeng.ca appears to boost the fortunes of our minuscule site.

So, if you are an aspiring enterprise looking for more exposure on the web, consider making your name verbose, putting a unique tag within it, and creating a meaningful app to go along with your worthy cause.