David Green: Search engine optimization

Stand out in a crowd
According to Forrester Research, search sites (engines and directories) originate 80% of all website traffic. With both individuals and companies alike widely using the Internet to conduct research to inform buying decisions, visibility on the web is critical. An IDC report 'Web positioning as a critical e-marketing tool', based on an extensive survey of 792 companies in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, noted that companies had three strategic objectives in optimising their presence on the web:

Visibility on key search sites is critical in the early stages of website and market development. This involves being listed in the appropriate category of a directory listing and search engine results, directly related to the company's core target market.
Generating qualified traffic for targeted marketing of specific products and services forms the second key objective..
The third, more tactical, objective is the respective ranking of a company with its competitors.

To achieve these goals, web sites must be optimised for search engine indexing. This includes good web copy that incorporates the keywords relevant to the target audience, effective customisation of page/browser title and meta tags on every page, design issues such as tables and frames, and securing quality links to your site.

Once optimised, the website must be submitted to computer-compiled search engines and manually edited directories for inclusion in their indexes. Companies can adopt a more quantitative approach by choosing to automate this process using specialist software or services. Alternatively they can adopt a more qualitative approach by submitting selected optimised pages manually. This can be done either internally or using a specialised external agency.

Whilst companies can pay for inclusion with a search engine or directory, an ever increasing number of companies are willing to pay for performance, where they bid against competitors to sponsor keywords relevant to their business. If a user conducts a search using the sponsored keyword or phrase, then the sponsor's paid listing will appear near the top of the first screen. These paid-for results used to be innocuously incorporated within the general editorial search results, until a recent recommendation from the US Federal Trade Commission for search services to improve disclosure of paid content within their listings. Results that match sponsored keywords will now typically be clearly differentiated e.g. positioned to the far right hand side of the screen. back to the top

The better netter
According to Inktomi, 75% of users click on the top five results of a search engine. Securing a strong search ranking requires effort - and on an ongoing basis. This effort needs to be conducted on an ongoing basis and companies should typically set themselves a time line of up to one year for evaluating results. Even before one evaluates successes in terms of generated sales, customer leads, competitor benchmarking and brand awareness and perception, there are several other obvious benefits to improving your web site's presence:

specified objectives readily translate into measurable deliverables and metrics
these can demonstrate the return on investment, providing a solid basis for securing future funding for existing and additional activities
given the global homogeneity of the web, the processes and documentation you will have produced can be easily replicated to other parts of your organisation such as other country practices. Not only does this demonstrate good knowledge sharing practices, but also produces obvious economies of scale for the organisation as a whole.
the improved reporting and referral information generated by this project will be invaluable for online/web promotional activity that will increasingly become an integral element of future direct marketing and advertising campaigns.

The goal is not to drive greater volumes of traffic per se to your site, but greater volumes of relevant traffic to the relevant sections of your site. back to the top

Search engine optimisation
Whilst web sites are designed with their intended audience in mind, the needs of an important constituent of that audience, search engine spiders, are often overlooked. Typically this results in a costly post-launch review of the site to make pages more amenable to indexing by search engines.

Create succinct, descriptive and unique titles for all pages - these are the first things spiders read. Always use the page description meta tag field. Whilst not all search engines will consider keyword meta tags, some will use them to categorise your page. Both the page title and page description will be displayed in the search engine results - so encourage searchers to click on your link and not a competitors!

Following are some basic Do's and Don'ts for using the keyword meta tag section:

Highlight misspellings or spelling variations (e.g. ebusiness versus e-business)
Include unique and specific terms that appear on the page as well as more general, related terms that people may use in a web search
Include terms your site addresses, but may not specifically be included on a given page
Include synonyms for terms used on the page (e.g., real estate, property, land)
Be careful about repeating root words (e.g., partner and partnership count the term "partner" twice). Preserve as many important phrases as possible while reducing repetition.
Include key terms in the title tag of the web page

Use commas and spaces to separate keywords when trying to conserve space. Spiders interpret commas as spaces, so words separated by a comma and a space is read as two spaces. (Search engines accept up to about 1,000 characters in the meta tags section.)
List competitors in the keyword section. Though not illegal, this practice is unethical and people have been sued for it.
Spam (e.g., repeating the same word many times: Tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, etc.). Many search engines will penalise or eliminate pages that do this.

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="15 days">: This tag tells search engines how often to visit the site.
<META NAME="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="global">,
<META NAME="RATING" CONTENT="general,">, and
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">:

These tags tell search engine spiders that the content is suitable for widespread distribution. back to the top

Writing for the web
Within the content that appears on screen, you can kill two birds with one stone. Numerous usability tests show that web site visitors prefer to scan pages, looking for visual clues, such as words in bold or in hyperlinks. Although relevance ranking algorithms vary between search engines, they generally attach greater weight to words near the top of a page, in bold, as part of a subhead or a hyperlink. If you were to grey out all plain text words on your web page, what is left is typically referred to as 'microtext'. At a glance these words in bold, subheads and hyperlinks should give visitors an indication of the content on the page and quickly help them decide if the page is relevant. This same microtext will also help ensure your page ranks highly for the keywords you've emphasised. Writing for the web is a very different discipline to other marketing communications.

Always use alternative text on all graphic items except a blank GIF that may be used to control layout. Similarly, provide text files that correspond to Flash files as Google and Inktomi don't crawl these files. (Google announced a Flash indexing algorithm in June 2008). Some search engines also won't list a site that opens with a splash page as redirects are often construed as spam. Tables and frames can also cause some problems for spiders. For expert advice you may wish to consult a search engine consultant - indeed a whole industry has grown up around search engine optimisation. Identify consultants and agencies at www.seopros.org and www.seoconsultants.com
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Securing links
Search engines give greater weight to sites that have many other sites linking to them, particularly if the referring site is a high-quality, topic-related site (e.g. a popular web directory or industry portal). Another way to boost link ratings is to identify, approach and solicit links from relevant third-party websites.

You may also wish to consider reciprocal links with carefully selected sites - this would benefit both parties. However you should determine and communicate protocols for establishing reciprocal links with other web sites, e.g. a weblinks policy that includes a list of desirable and undesirable sites. Avoid artificial links from link exchange programs and link farms as these do not constitute quality links and will not improve your ranking on search engines.

Desirable links - Industry/portal sites and vertical search engines, professional associations, educational institutions from which your organisation recruits, clients, trade publications/media sites, charities you support etc.

Undesirable links - Political or religious sites, individual, personal or family home pages, pornographic or otherwise explicit/offensive sites, companies with which your organisation has no professional affiliation. back to the top

There are several clear advantages to systematically identifying relevant third-party websites and soliciting links from them:

Increase in quality traffic - links from related sites will bring greater volumes of relevant traffic to the appropriate e.g. links from university careers web pages, and other recruitment websites, would be directed to your careers web pages.

Brand awareness - multiple points of presence for your company on groups of related websites not only create brand awareness, but also brand identity, i.e. your company becomes associated with a particular service that the web user may not have known about previously. The likelihood of users clicking on the hyperlink to visit particular pages on your site will be much greater if they are repeatedly exposed to it.

When improper, or out-of-date, references to your company are detected, approach the offending sites and ask them to update their listing, description, your logo etc. This is to their benefit as it updates the information on their own site.

Higher search engine rankings - the number of third-party links is an important factor in how search engine algorithms calculate relevance (and thus ranking on the results page). Greater number of quality links = greater relevance to users search term = higher position in search results = greater number of click-throughs/visitors to your web pages.

'Hug' competitor presence - such a project could identify and target sites that have links to competitors' websites. If appropriate, approach the editors of these sites and request a link to your site also.

Appropriately, conducting research on search engines and directories would identify such sites. For example, although the syntax varies across search engines, you can easily identify all sites that link to your site by entering "link: www.mysite.com"

It is important that all research results and requests to third parties for a link to your site are documented. This provides an audit trail and a record of all correspondence in the event that you later request a website remove the link to your site. Documentation also allows for more effective management reports and greater measurement of activities and success.

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