If you’re the only producer of prosthetic canary wings, you probably don’t need to worry about the abbreviation ‘SEO’, as you’re one of a kind. However, if you produce a commodity with masses of competitors – print for example – then you do. This is because the lump of definitions, descriptions and mathematical functions that you call your website won’t attract online browsers or internet searchers to your business. The only way to snare these people is to make search engines describe your website to the wider world.
At the basic level, when a user searches online, they’re searching indexes in which websites are listed, not the websites themselves. These indexes are compiled for the search engines by bits of code called ‘spiders’. These spiders crawl the internet and report back on what’s out there.
So, if you’re a digital printer based in Basildon and someone types the words ‘digital printer Basildon’ into an internet search engine, it will come up with a list of options. You want your company to come out on top, or near the top, of these rankings. This is because the internet customer is an impatient breed – they may not scroll down the page to look at all the options, never mind clicking to look at what’s available on the next page. So, you need to tweak your website so you’re near the top of the rankings pile.
When people talk about tweaking their websites to get more traffic, they generally mean two things: search engine optimisation (SEO), which is making your website friendly to those spiders; and search engine marketing (SEM), which is making the rest of the internet friendly to your site – again for those spiders.
The ultimate aim is the same: to get to the top of the first search engine results page (SERP) when a user types a given keyword into a search engine – whether that is due to sponsored adverts or natural search results.
This inevitably leads to Google. That’s not to say Yahoo! and MSN, for example, aren’t important, but if you’re going to concentrate on one search engine, it might as well be the one that’s going to deliver more than 90% of your search traffic.
This is the figure Ray Burn, managing director of alocalprinter.com, says Google delivers his website (see boxout). Yahoo! and MSN direct just 6%-7% of his traffic.
I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about Yahoo!, says Burn. If you’re optimised for Google, you’ll do well with other search engines.
Binding exposure
SEO is as much about usability as it is about technically pleasing search engines. It encompasses overall site structure and individual pages and not only involves exposing as much of your site to search engines as possible, but at times involves cutting off great swathes of content that would otherwise lower your overall site ranking in the eyes of Google.
So structurally, you need a site that makes sense. Have a clear plan of how you want traffic to flow through your site. Clearly, your home page is going to have the lion’s share, but if you list all of your products individually on that one page, neither your customers nor search engines will thank you.
Instead, ‘hub’ and ‘spoke’ your site. This means that if you offer a range of products of a certain type, list these on an index page, ‘the hub’, then link to the details of each product on a separate page, ‘the spoke’. This makes those index pages relevant and drives traffic through them, so they’ll rank higher with search engines.
It should also mean you have a sound URL structure – mrprinter.com/brochures is a big improvement on mrprinter.com/142423/as4dfsg3. You can help search engines even more on Google, Yahoo! and MSN by creating an XML site map, which tells the spiders what to index.
There may be pages that you don’t want indexed on a search engine, perhaps because they are poorly structured, or contain lots of duplicate content, which search engines don’t value. There are a couple of ways to do this.
You can create a robots.txt file, which defines any areas of your website a spider cannot crawl, or you can stop a spider indexing the target of a link on a page with a ‘no follow’ tag, or prevent a page being indexed with a ‘no index’ tag. These types of commands are referred to as metadata.
Spiders love metadata as it illuminates the structure of web page contents. Search engines read code hierarchically, so use headlines for things like product names and body style for descriptions. Spiders understand the code that defines these styles and so can tell which is the more important.
Other metadata includes page title, description and keywords. The keywords metadata is a bit of a red herring as the main search engines are reported to no longer use this to determine the relevance of a page because of misuse.
That’s not to say keywords are not important. The obvious place to look for some choice keywords is almost certainly your biggest rival. Head over to their site, hit ‘view’ on your browser and choose ‘view source’ to find out what they’re using.
The more sophisticated way to identify keywords is using some of the tools available from the likes of Google.
Google provides a keyword tool with its Adwords service that lets you see search volume and advertiser competition against a given keyword or phrase. You’ll want a mix of key words and phrases and the goal is to find some with the most search volume and least competition. Just make sure they’re relevant. If you’re really stuck, there are plenty of keyword generation tools out there on the internet.
Now you have to consider SEM, which is the things that you can do outside of your own website to bring in traffic. Compared to SEO, which can take months before the benefits become apparent, SEM results can be seen more readily.
The best-known form of online marketing is Google’s Adwords service, which allows you to choose keywords for the searches you want to appear next to, decide how much you want to pay per click and set a monthly budget to stop you paying more than you want. The more you pay, the more prominence Google will give to your advert.
You should also submit your website to online directories, such as the dmoz.org open directory project, which is free, and also well-known names such as Yahoo! (which isn’t). There are services that will submit your website to any number of directories for a fee, but it’s debatable whether it’s worth the money as they may not be relevant to your industry.
A step further is to try and create links to your site from others – a practice called linkbaiting. The idea is to identify a relevant site with a high page rank and attract their audience to you with a link to something on your site they would find interesting, by, for example, commenting on articles.
There’s some debate over whether Google’s PageRank system – which gives a score from one to 10 on how important a site is – is a ‘live’ score, but the general idea is still valid.
Nick Gillet, managing director of Tangent One, part of Tangent Communications, advises phases of growth and consolidation: each consolidation phase removes weak areas, but leaves a larger and more effective base. SEM is all about testing and refinement, which produces steady improvements in results, whether your goal is page views or transaction value.
Social networks
However, the new worlds of SEM are social networks and communities. If you can get online audiences talking about your business or products, you can build ‘search equity’.
Ideally, this is done for you by others for free because of the quality of your content. Short of that, giving your audience the tools to talk about you on other sites such as Facebook is worthwhile, or you could put your content within these communities, such as creating a Twitter feed.
A good real-world example is what natural search specialist iCrossing is doing for a new Toyota car. They have blogs, started a design competition with the Royal College of Art and run a Twitter feed from someone driving the new model on a single tank of petrol.
Even when it might not be your customer base, customers will find you through that network, said Nilhan Jayasinghe, head of natural search at iCrossing. That’s what links are really – it’s trying to judge credibility and authority.
Search engine success is a moving target. So every time a search engine changes the way it operates, you need to respond. The do-it-yourself route will demand time and the building of expertise; the get-someone-in option will be one you have to revisit to ensure your sites are up to scratch.
Being your own search engine guru is possible. It’s not technical to the point of writing lots of code, but you have to understand it. Search engine experts are surprisingly open about the tools of the trade and even a cursory scour of the internet will turn up a host of blogs and websites, tools and tricks, to help you enter their clandestine world.
A good place to start is sphinn.com, which aggregates articles about SEO and allows SEO experts to vote for what’s credible. Getting in an expert for a few days fills that gap in your skill-set, but also carries its own problems. You’re unlikely to see the benefits for four months or so, by which time your expert will be over the horizon before you’re in a position to assess whether they were worth the up to £800 daily rate you can pay for the top SEO companies.
Instead, make sure you get in contact with companies they have previously worked with to judge what they have achieved. The alternative is to dismiss SEO as sheer geekery and save your pennies. But if you’re not on page one of Google, you’ve got a shop that’s shut, warns Burn. ¦
CASE STUDY: ALOCALPRINTER.COM
Ray Burn is managing director of alocalprinter.com. He took the DIY route with SEO and, although it forced him to the conclusion that he’s no longer a printer, rather an online retailer of print, getting SEO right has doubled his firm’s turnover.
In 2003, Burn took over a £1m-turnover print company he describes as a back street GTO operation. After a couple of years of consolidating and stabilising the company, Burn decided to become an e-commerce operation, launching online in February 2006.
Within six months the company was pulling in a few hundred pounds a month with an average order value of around £150 and 100 unique visitors a day.
Just over a year after launch, Burn began implementing SEO. The first positive results took a few months to show, but by 2008 the company was making £80,000 a month, contributing £1m of a £2m turnover with 1,200 visitors a day to the site.
Burn says that if he wasn’t in printing, he’d make a career out of SEO. He learned the trade himself, under the guidance of a professional, and from reading up on the subject from a variety of online resources.
But even then he said it was a full-time job and took around six months to get up to speed.
Useful Links
Matt Cutts
David Naylor
Sphinn
Search Engine Journal
