Can They Find You?
You’re
going online with your first website, or upgrading an existing website,
and you’re facing a difficult question: How easy will it be for people
to find us with a search engine, if in fact they can find us at all?
The numbers are daunting. Google’s search page mentions that it is currently looking at 4.3 billion Web pages. A search for "advertising agency MA" yields 2,220,000 results. However, with a search for "Sullivan Creative MA", our company is the subject of 8 of the first 10 results.
So they can find you, even in that huge universe of information. But what’s the trick? Or tricks?
Spiders and Spam
There are more than a dozen major search engines out there, with different technologies, interfaces and business models, but they’re all trying to deliver the same thing: satisfactory search results for their visitors.
To do this, they have to accomplish three tasks:
- Locate websites;
- Catalog them in their databases; and
- Prioritize them in any given search.
Number 3) is the task that attracts all the attention; by now, it’s a given that any major search engine will eventually locate most of the websites out there, using software spiders (a.k.a. search bots or crawlers) that find sites and report key information back to the company’s databases, where it is effectively cataloged. But the advertising agency who shows up as number 1,500,000 in that list of 2,220,000 has reason for despair.
This situation has led to the creation of an entire industry, led by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies, dedicated to helping your website make it into the first 10 or 20 results. SEO companies range from garage hackers to large, established firms working for Fortune 500 companies.
One of the earliest SEO approaches was keyword spam. One of the things the spiders look for is a keyword, something in the site corresponding to the word (or words) searchers will type into the engine. In this approach, optimizers filled the site with dozens of iterations of, let’s say, "chrome hubcaps", and even set up software programs to bombard the search engines with the site on a daily or hourly basis.
Search engines consider this approach "spam". It doesn’t lead to customer satisfaction, and they may blacklist you from their engine.
Organic Optimization
"Organic" or "natural" optimization involves basically playing by the search engine rules and sharing their goal, a satisfied customer. You do this by investing in the architecture and content of your site.
OneUpWeb, a large-scale SEO company (www.oneupweb.com), publishes several white papers about organic optimization. They point out that spiders are looking at four things:
- Title Tag, the single most important element, the words that appear in the top bar of your web browser when your site is displayed. This is also usually the hyperlinked phrase on the Search Results page that will lead to your site;
- Key Words, the terms users enter (revealed by market research), which should be found on your site;
- Body Text, the copy on your site that tells the story of your business, which the engine will evaluate for organization, keywords and relevance; and
- Meta Tags, descriptive terms which the programmer enters in your site code, no longer as critical as they once seemed, but still important.
The information architect, copywriter and programmer at your ad agency will work with you to structure and write your website with the clarity and substance required to optimize it naturally. As Google says in its Webmaster Guidelines, "Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content."
Paid Optimization
Of course there’s a buck to be made here, and the search engine companies have figured out different ways to make it. The details of their plans are beyond the scope of this article, but they come in two different flavors:
Paid Inclusion. You pay to have your site reviewed by the engine’s spiders, with the assumption that, once reviewed, it will be included somewhere in the relevant search lists. Google does not offer this. The primary plan is Overture’s SiteMatch, offered by Yahoo! and others, which charges a yearly fee. Paid inclusion does not offer any placement or ranking benefits; you will need to optimize the site yourself (but you were going to do that anyway, right?).
Pay-per-Click. This is similar to an auction: you bid on particular keywords. The more popular the keyword, the higher the price. Your site doesn’t have to be optimized: if you pay top dollar, you’re displayed at the top of the first page. Google and Overture both offer variations of this service. It can get quite expensive, as much as $50 each time somebody clicks on your paid link. Once you’ve used up the budget you signed up for, the ad is no longer displayed.
Search in the 21st Century
There are indications that these different search engine business models are chasing a value proposition that is starting to fade. In his Alertbox for June 30, 2004, "Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster" (www.useit.com), web usability guru Jakob Nielsen argues persuasively that the engines are getting so good at delivering results that people now simply visit a site to get information and move on, exhibiting very little interest in the site itself.
In one research project, Nielsen determined that, given a task to complete on the Web, users started at a search engine 88% of the time. But "search engines have essentially become answer engines", because it is so easy to use them to gather information. This is not good news if you’re being charged $25 each time somebody gets an answer from your site.
E-commerce sites are an exception, since they may make an actual sale, even to a casual visitor, and they have confirmation and fulfillment steps to help build a relationship and generate return visits. If you don’t have an e-commerce site, it’s not at all clear that it’s worth investing any of your budget in the "optimization" services offered by the engines and the SEO companies, given the shifting direction of Web traffic. Of course, you should optimize your website for clarity and relevance, and give your visitors plenty of useful content.
You may also want to target a particular list of visitors, and drive them to your site with an integrated marketing campaign of advertisements, direct mail and e-mail, rather than waiting for nibbles from the Internet universe. In any case, an attractive, engaging, well-designed site will accomplish what you’re after — loyal customers and visitors — and it will have the added value of at least getting the attention of the search engines.
Terms and Traps
Terms
Click Through — Activating any hyperlink, whether paid or not
Cloaking — Sending spiders to alternate pages that will not be seen by visitors. Considered spamming by search engines.
Conversion — Act of turning a Web visitor into a Web customer.
Daily Burn Rate — How much of your pay-per-click budget is spent each day.
Doorway/Gateway/Bridge Pages — Low quality pages designed to attract search engines by repetitive or invisible use of key words. Considered spam.
Dynamic Content — Web page information that changes in response to visitor or other information. Originally impenetrable by spiders, but technology now exists to make dynamic content accessible to search engines.
Spiders (a.k.a. search bots or crawlers) — Software programs that search the Internet, find sites and report key information about them back to the search engine’s databases.
XML Trusted Feed — Direct feed of information to search engines from Search Engine Marketing companies. Not accepted by Google.
Traps
Flash Files — Can almost never be read by spiders and may confuse them.
Frames — If site is built with frames, it’s very difficult to search.
Overwhelming/Complex Graphics — Can almost never be read by spiders and may confuse them.
Resources
www.seopros.org Not-for-profit, best practices organization for search engine optimization professionals
www.highrankings.com/forum Search engine optimization forum
team@sullivancr.com
www.sullivancreative.com
For information on how we can help you with your next marketing program, contact us at Sullivan Creative.
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