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ISSUE 2: DECEMBER 2005 In This Issue: CURRENT ISSUE FROM THE ARCHIVES JOIN US |
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION DEMYSTIFIED By Val Swisher, President and CEO, Oak Hill Corporation What if you threw a party and nobody came? That would be your web site, if you don't ensure that it will be discovered by your potential customers amid the millions and millions of sites on the Internet. So many people use the Internet to research companies, products, and technologies that it's an essential step when designing any web site. Internet visibility relies on showing up as close to the top as possible in an Internet search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an umbrella term that covers a number of activities intended to increase the likelihood of coming in close to the top when a prospect is looking for your kind of company. Some basic skill in html is all the technical expertise required for SEO. More critical is the ability to understand how prospects are looking for firms like yours, and finding methods of getting in their way, so to speak. How Search Engines Work Search engines regularly comb through sites, looking for content, search terms, meta-tags, page titles and links to the site. They use this information to rank sites according to relevance vis à vis a given search. For instance, a site for a semiconductor company that makes FPGAs should have terms such as semiconductor, FPGA, field programmable transistors, and so forth in the copy on their site. They should also have searchable terms written into their page titles and in meta-tags (which the visitor does not see, but the search engines do). And they should have links to their site from relevant companies, such as EDN and the Semiconductor Industry Association, because these organizations are well-respected, have fairly high page ranking (more about page ranking below) and are directly relevant to the company’s business. Properly executed, all this helps to boost the semiconductor company’s site rating by search engines. Google and Yahoo! are the 800 pound gorillas of SEO. Because of their influence in the market, they write the rules about what are acceptable in optimizing a site for search engines – and what is not acceptable. People have tried all kinds of ways of “gaming” the system. For instance, some site owners have programmed in large numbers of search terms using the same color text as the site background. These are invisible to the site visitor, but are read by search engines. Another technique is to get as many other sites as possible – relevant or not – to link to one’s own site. The search engine folks are wise to these gaming techniques, and will penalize sites when they find this sort of thing going on. They are looking for true relevance, honest links and legitimate use of search terms. It’s a continuing race between the gamers and the search engines, but my money is on the search engines in the long term. Google gives each site a Page Rank, and this ranking is generally accepted as the gold standard. Ten is the maximum number of points a site can receive, and the rank is expressed in terms of how many points out of ten a site holds. For instance, Google itself gets 10 out of 10 (10/10)! You can easily discover the page ranking of any site by downloading the free Google Toolbar. Go to http://www.toolbar.google.com. (Google Toolbar is compatible with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, on Windows, Mac OSX and Red Hat Linux.) Once the toolbar is installed, you will see a green bar in the center of it labeled Page Rank. If you run your cursor over it, it will tell you how many points out of ten that site ranks. The object is to get as high a score for your site as possible, as this will bring you closer to the top of a search. So let’s take a look at what you can do to boost your site rating. Search Terms Using the right search terms in the right way will help your site to come up as highly relevant in a search. The most desirable terms are those that people search on frequently, but are not commonly found. (Few of us are in that happy situation!) An example would be the term “servowriter.” Searching for servowriter turns up 279 results in Google, which is an extremely low number. People looking to find servowriters will always search on that term, but there are few firms that offer servowriters, making these firms highly visible. The vast majority of companies don’t have the luxury of employing uncommon search terms on their sites. But it’s worth the time to try to identify a less-commonly-used term or phrase. DogPile and Metacrawler report data on search terms. To see DogPile’s search term report, go to Popular Search Terms, or go to Metacrawler’s Popular Search Terms. These pages have links to the search terms and phrases that people use most frequently. A more granular look at searching can be found at Wordtracker. Wordtracker tracks search terms from several sources, and you can see 30 day’s worth of searches, but the service is not free. The objective is to find terms that people are using to find companies like yours. With luck, you may discover a term that people are frequently using to find companies like yours, but that other sites aren’t using. That is truly the best of all possible worlds. Search Terms on Your Site Once you determine which search terms are best suited to your business, you need to use them liberally on your site. They need to be incorporated in the navigation bar. Nobody searches on terms such as “Home,” “Management” or “About Us.” That doesn’t mean that every tab in the navigation bar has to be a search term, but keep search terms in mind when you are making decisions about navigation. The text, headlines and subheads need to employ the search terms as frequently as makes sense. You don’t want your web copy to be overly long or repetitive, but you do want to make sure that key terms are incorporated on every page if you can manage it. Google uses meta-terms in page ranking, and the other search engine companies follow Google’s lead. One type of meta-term, the page title, can be seen in the upper left hand corner of your browser window. When possible, use search terms in these page titles. Meta-tags, another type of meta-term, can be programmed for every page of your site. Meta-tags provide additional information to search engines, but are not visible to site visitors. Use search terms here as well. Meta-tags can be useful but as they are prone to gaming, search engines rely more heavily on the actual content of the pages. Site Map You’ve probably noticed that some sites have site maps and some don’t. You may have used a site map to help navigate a complex site, or to find a page that you remember from a previous visit. What you may not know is that site maps are used by the search engines because they make it easier for the search engines to traverse the site. As maps are useful to both site visitors and the engines, incorporate a map into your site. Google AdWords You can guarantee showing up on a Google search if you pay for Google AdWords. You have probably noticed when you do a search on Google that you get a list of Sponsored Links along with the search results. When you click on one of the Sponsored Links, that company pays Google for the click-through. Google has a very affordable program that allows you to test its effectiveness for a limited investment. Go to Google Advertising Programs for more details. Links to Your Site The most important technique of all – and perhaps the most difficult – is getting credible sites to link to your site. “Credible” means that the linking site itself has a high page rank, and that it is directly relevant to your business or site content. If your site is about small business software and the links to your site are from sites like indiangaming.com, cigarsbewe.com and funny.net, the search engines will penalize you for attempting to game the system. If on the other hand, the linking sites are from homebizcomputer.com, sba.gov and businesscomputing.net, these links will help to boost your page rank. Reciprocal links are not rated as highly as non-reciprocal links. There may be very good reasons for a site to link to yours, and vice versa, but they will be discounted somewhat. Your goal should be to acquire non-reciprocal links, which you acquire over time as other sites discover reasons to link to yours. Avoid “link farms” and requests for reciprocal links from unrelated sites; links resulting from these will be penalized. There are a variety of ways to get other sites to link to yours. If you are active in an industry trade association, the association site may link to your site. Getting white papers or articles published on other sites (or their associated “paper publications”) may result in links to your site. An industry directory site or search engine directory will provide a link to your site (and may also require payment). Advertising in relevant online publications will result in links to your site even from the smallest and cheapest of ads. Make a list of the sites that will provide the most valuable links (as determined by the sites’ page ranking and relevance to your own site), and decide case by case how to go about getting links from them. Continue to do this over time. Some organizations will drop your link if the material is time-sensitive or when they revise their site. The more valuable links you acquire, the higher your page rank will rise. Keep Up to Date Search engines change the rules all the time. People figure out new ways to game the engines, and the engines change the way they evaluate and rank sites. Google and Yahoo! both have pages that partially explain how they rank sites. (They never give away the whole picture. They don’t want to make it too easy for the gamers.) There are subscription services that will send you updates and changes for a fee. One of them is Search Engine News, which charges $97 for six months. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process, so your site should be a work in progress at all times. Staying abreast of the search engine rules, developing new ways of getting credible sites to link to yours, and assuring that you’re making the best use of search terms will create a steadily increasing stream of new visitors to your site as your site comes up closer to the top in Internet searches. |