What is Web Marketing?

Would you be surprised to know that most visitors to websites visit it after their initial contact with the company? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) improves your position within search engines and directories. This enables potential customers to see who you are, what you do and where you are located.

 In the current climate, you might think you can do without the cost of a search engine optimisation program. But you can't do without the benefits! A good SEO strategy is worth the investment - particularly as times get tougher.

 In this article on Search Engine Optimisation (first published in July / August 2002 for the Web Express Guide), we look at why a SEO program is essential for your website.

 Why Should I Invest Time and Money into SEO?

 This is the most common question that's asked of search engine optimization experts. Search engines are the glue that holds together the millions of people who search on the Internet, and the Websites that they look for. Although a Webmaster can buy placement on some search engines, search engine optimization is crucial for the other search engines that list their results according to algorithms.

 Optimization is best suited to the online business that doesn't have at their disposal a small fortune to dish out to search engines each month for a top listing, and also to the Webmaster who wants to reach every segment of their target audience.

 A good ranking is not the extent of search engine optimization. While it's part of the optimization process, it is by no means the whole picture. Another aspect of optimization is targeted traffic. If someone comes to your "car insurance" Website from a search engine results page for the search term "toys", then they're not considered to be targeted traffic. There is no point expending money and effort targeting keywords that have no relevance to your market.

 When a user completes a search on a search engine, there are three things that can happen:

•  your Website appears in the results,
• your Website doesn't appear in the results,
• or your competitor’s Website appears in the results (whether you're there or not!).

 It's quite obvious which of the three is desired by most online businesses, and the best way to achieve this is through search engine optimization.

 Search engine optimization is the most effective form of online marketing and advertising on the Internet today. The exposure that you can obtain through the search engines is only limited by the optimization professional who is in control of your site.

 But Search Engine Optimization is Risky!

 This is another one of those statements that are pretty common among those who are unfamiliar with the SEO industry. Search engine optimization is a form of online marketing and promotion. If you were to sign on with an advertising agency, are they going to guarantee that the advertising campaign is going to be a hit? Absolutely not. There are always risks involved when you invest money to promote or market your business, but there are certain things that you can do to make the decision-making process less painful.

 When you take the plunge into search engine optimization, be sure to ask some questions before you make your decision.

 Who are you talking to?

 Is it a sales representative, or is it an actual person from the company's SEO team? From this, and your conversation, you should be able to decipher the type of client relationship style that the company has. You should always be able to liaise with the actual technical staff working on your project.

 What is the company’s policy on spam?

 Spam is unethical and constitutes extremely bad practice, and to engage a company that uses spam in their work is not a good idea. It can also get your website banned from most major search engines. Spam comes in many forms, and includes such dodgy and outdated methods as hidden text (that you can’t see but the search engines can), cloaking (showing a bona fide user one page and a search engine another), keyword stuffing, bulk submissions, machine generated pages, etc.

 Is the company going to work with you continuously, or is it going to be a one-off campaign?

 The SEO company that you choose should work with you monthly to achieve better rankings and drive more targeted traffic to your Website, as well as presenting new ideas to you. Ideally, you should be able to receive monthly reports on how your site is progressing, and if necessary have access to a technician to discuss your ideas before commencing the project.

 Your SEO company should always maintain a confidential client list, be very wary of any that list their clients on their home website or insist upon adding their logo onto your front page! A professional SEO company will have some working examples that they will be able to show you online using a search engine in real time.

 These are some things to consider when deciding on a company. These questions above, as well as some thorough research into the company and it's successes, should reduce some of your uncertainty about search engine optimization, and ease your investment worries.

 When Will I See The Effects Of My SEO Investment?

 The time it takes to see the results of your search engine optimization campaign will depend on many factors. A few factors that come into play when determining how long it will take to see a result include:

•  The intensity of your campaign
• How much money was invested
• The amount of submissions
• The age of the site
• The size of the site
• The focus of the campaign

 It will usually take from a few weeks to a few months for your site to hit the search engines, as they never publish their update patterns. Once in, then your SEO company will be able to concentrate on your results, pushing them straight up the lists to high ranking positions. An SEO company that can provide a top 30 listing is doing a good job, top 20 is excellent and a guaranteed top 10 position is the Holy Grail!

 Conclusion

 There are always risks when you invest your hard-earned money back into your business, and search engine optimization is no exception. But then, there have always been 3 important positions in business: location, location, location! Both online and offline, your business location may be the difference between succeeding and failing.

  That being said, there are still steps you need to take to ensure that you make a sound decision, in choosing the right company and thus tailoring an effective optimization campaign to suit your business's needs and goals. And properly done, in conjunction with a professional and easy to use website, you can soon see your traffic – and linked sales – start to rise!

 Key phrases are key

The first step in developing a search-engine-friendly site is choosing the right focus for your Web pages. You need to identify the keywords and phrases most relevant to and popular with your target audience, and then incorporate them into your site.

Search engines index a staggering number of Web pages. To generate a meaningful amount of traffic you need to be listed on the first or second page of search results. And achieving this for a one-word search will be next to impossible. You will just be one of thousands of sites vying for those top positions.

At the same time, Internet users learn over time to refine their searches to get more-relevant results. Someone searching for “digital camera reviews” instead of “cameras” will get a fraction of the search results, and those results will be much more useful to them.

For those reasons, you should focus on two or three key phrases rather than individual words. Achieving a top-10 position for a search phrase such as “digital camera reviews” is a more attainable goal than gaining the equivalent position for “cameras” — and it will yield much more qualified traffic.

A number of resources can assist you in identifying the most popular of relevant keywords and phrases. For instance, search engine listings provider Overture.com offers a “search term suggestion tool” that will tell you how many times a particular word or phrase was searched for by its users during the past month. A car dealer would discover that the keyword “car” is more than five times as popular as the keyword “auto.” And a clothing retailer would find that “clothing” is 30% more popular than “clothes” and nearly twice as popular as “apparel.”

If you have a single keyword in mind, you can use the free Overture tool to suggest good key phrases to target, ranked in order of popularity. For example, enter “clothing” and you'll be presented with related key phrases such as “baby clothing,” “kids clothing,” and “plus-size clothing.” Your SEO company, using their professional tools should be able to draw up an analysis of the best keywords for your site.

Beyond the mere presence of the appropriate words on your site's Web pages, where on the pages those words appear is critical as well. The higher up on the page, the more weight the keyword receives. This makes intuitive sense, as a page that leads off with “Maori art” is much more likely to be relevant to the topic of Maori art than a page that displays “Maori art” in the last paragraph.

But appearances can be deceiving. Often the keyword-rich body copy appears to the user to be at the top of the page, when in actuality Javascripts, tables, and image maps may be pushing the copy quite far down in the HTML source code, which is what the search engines read. A search-engine-savvy HTML programmer can strip out unnecessary code and reorganize the code that remains so that your body copy is more prominent.

Weave a web of links

Key phrases aren't the sole determinant of search engine prominence. Links matter too. A network of sites that link to your site will not only drive traffic in their own right, but they will also increase your “link popularity.” Search engines use link popularity to indicate the worth of a site's content. They consider sites with many links from other sites more likely to be relevant to a search and therefore rank those sites higher.

Industry heavyweight Google uses its proprietary PageRank system to place the most emphasis on links from sites that it considers “important.” In other words, links from sites possessing better PageRank scores will be given more weight and have a greater positive effect on your position in the search results. You can check your PageRank rating with the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com).

To boost your link popularity, submit listings for your Website with major directories such as Yahoo!, Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org), and LookSmart. Also request that niche sites and vertical portals in your industry link to your site.

Stay away from automated submission bots that promise submissions to thousands of search engines and directories. You will be paying for submissions to totally irrelevant or defunct Websites. And reputable search engines tend to ignore or penalize bulk submissions.

Likewise, resist the temptation to boost your link popularity by submitting to “free for all” links pages. These are simply pages that are full of links — you submit your Web address and are automatically added. Search engines discount these pages too. (In fact, some search engines, such as Google, are known to “punish” sites for associating with them.)

It is far better to spend time establishing reciprocal links with sites that offer content complementary to yours. Alternatively, developing an affiliate program, in which you reward sites that link to yours, can improve your site's link popularity. A professional SEO company should be able to develop an reciprocal linking program for your site, that ensures good quality links from other similar sites.

HTML to warm a search engine's heart

Okay, you've identified the key phrases you need to focus on and made them prominent in your Website copy. You've made your site Miss Popularity in terms of links with other sites. Now what? Time to make sure that the HTML code that makes up your pages includes search-engine-friendly elements:

Title tag

This is the most critical HTML element on your Web page for search engine rankings. A good page title is 5-13 words long with important keywords placed near or at the beginning. The title tag serves a dual purpose: Compelling wording makes it a call to action on the search results page and it acts as a heading for the page in browser windows and bookmarks listings.

Alt tags

Only Google and AltaVista support them, but alt tags are a key element in creating an accessible site. Search engines can't “read” images, including navigation elements, and streaming media. Alt tags serve as alternate, readable text for the search engines.

Hyperlink text

Google considers link text to be highly relevant to the linked page. Changing all your “click here” links within your site to keyword-rich phrases will boost your rankings for those keywords.

Meta-tags

Most of the major search engines now ignore them, but Inktomi (which provides secondary results for MSN Search), AltaVista, and SearchNZ will still index meta-descriptions and/or meta-keywords. Make sure they reflect the page content, or you may be accused of “spamming.”

Design that works

The truly optimized Website does not merely incorporate search-engine friendliness as an add-on; such friendliness is built in from the ground up. Certain design elements make every page of your site accessible to search engine spiders (the software that search engines use to explore and download sites). Your site should offer:

• access to every important page on your site via simple text links from the spider's starting point — typically your home page. Search engines have difficulty following links that rely on Flash or Javascript.
• A site map that uses text links.
• No “stop characters” (?, &, +, =, %, cgi-bin) in URLs. Stop characters are rampant on “dynamic” sites that are connected to databases. Search engines have difficulty indexing and following links from these pages.
• Flat directory structure. Many spiders seldom go beyond the third or fourth level of your site, or more than three or four subdirectories deep.
• File names and directory names that include good keywords.
• Use HTML 3.5, with as little ECMAScript, DHTML or fancy code as possible.
  

Of course, this is only scratching the surface of SEO, there are many more professional secrets that you need to keep on top of! The complex algorithms that search engines use change frequently, and it is a full time job ensuring that your site conforms to the latest standards. And always remember that the optimum time to start a relationship with your SEO company is before starting the development of your site, when they are able to involve themselves in every aspect of your site.

So do the sensible thing, and put your Web Marketing campaign in the hands of the professionals! Click here to contact us online, or ring 900 46 72 63 to speak to a representative for a free, no obligation consultation.