|
|
Search Engine Optimization
The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to tap into the 300 to 350 million searches conducted each day on the Internet to drive highly targeted, self-selecting prospects to your Web site. And do so by benefiting from people's desire to find what they're looking for through independent search results. (How often do you suppose people use search engines for the ads?)
The way we practice it, SEO involves re-architecting and rewriting your Web site or specific pages so that they show up as high as possible in search engine results for searches that are relevant to the content of your site or its pages. In some cases it may involve creating content in a separate domain. In most cases, an SEO program also involves impacting off-page factors, such as in-bound links, that are important to the algorithms search engines use to determine their search rankings.
We emphasize the word "relevant" because SEO is also used by some sites to spam search engines by deceiving users into clicking on a search result expecting to find one thing and getting something completely different. We do not engage in this practice. We help Web sites attract targeted visitors who are likely to be interested in what their sites have to offer.
SEO can be a very powerful marketing vehicle for certain kinds of businesses and organizations. We make this qualification because, unfortunately, not all business categories can derive equal benefit from SEO. So the first thing we do, prior to recommending a search engine optimization program, is to analyze and evaluate just what kind of opportunity you have.
The primary factors that determine success with SEO are keywords, competition and site architecture. For a detailed explanation, please see our discussion,
Evaluating the Opportunity. Otherwise, the remainder of this discussion assumes you can benefit from SEO.
To better understand the discussion to follow, it is strongly recommended that you first read our essays: About Search Engines, Evaluating the Opportunity, and Importance of Keywords. Also helpful might be A SE Marketing Program, as it provides a snapshot of what a program looks like tactically.
What SEO Can and Cannot Achieve
SEO can:
- Increase your visibility in search engines and directories for search terms that are relevant to your content. Thus, it can help you reach prospects who are actively looking for what you have to offer and send them to your site. If you are better positioned in the search engines than your competitors, you’ll get more of the highly targeted sales leads that Internet search offers than will your competitors.
- Being well positioned in the search engines also adds credibility to your site due to the objective editorial nature of search results. This is a benefit not enjoyed by advertising on search engines, including cost-per-click keyword advertising. Because they enjoy editorial integrity, search results usually get far more clickthroughs than paid ads.
- If your Web pages and their meta tags are well written, the resulting title and description of your search result will be clear about your content or what you’re offering and thereby help screen out non-relevant viewers and entice more highly targeted visitors to your site.
- Finally, it’s important to know that results of an SEO campaign are very measurable, as described in more detail below.
SEO cannot:
- Guarantee that your site will rank at the top of every search engine for all your keyword phrases. The variables that determine rankings are far too complex to control in any definitive way. Each search engine has its own algorithm and these algorithms and other factors (e.g., how frequently SEs index pages) are always changing. There can be no specific guarantees in SEO—e.g., the first position in Google for "keyword xyz"—however, we can project the overall impact of a campaign.
- Knock your competitors’ sites off the search results (unless, perhaps, you’re willing to spend far more money than it’s worth).
- Be implemented as a one-off project. Because the world of search engines is in constant change (e.g., algorithms change, search habits change), continuous analysis and tweaking is required. This is necessary, though not necessarily a major undertaking. The larger the program, the more keywords to manage (and perhaps continue to add), the greater the scope of work on an ongoing basis.
What It Means to Be Well Positioned in SEs
Your site is well positioned in search engines when you are getting a good share (ideally better than your competitors) of self-selecting, targeted prospects clicking through to your site from search engines. That's the bottom line. It may seem obvious, yet we've found many site owners are unaware of the distinction between getting site visits and sales, and being #9 on Google, #12 on Hotbot and #3 on AltaVista for "red widget software."
Rankings of specific keyword phrases by themselves can be deceptive. Having high rankings for specific keywords will translate into traffic, but only if they are actually searched on. They will translate into sales, but only if they're relevant to what you offer. And, as we explain in the following, your rankings for specific keywords are only part of the story.
The classic approach in SEO is to target specific keyword phrases and optimize pages on your site to show up high in the search rankings for them. And in fact this is what we do—making certain, of course, that we're targeting the best keyword phrases, selected based on some relationship between relevance and popularity. (See
Keyword Strategy for more information.)
But this is just one dimension of what's possible in SEO. Another dimension is to optimize your pages for keyword searches you do not target, or miscellaneous keyword searches that are nevertheless relevant to your site. The rationale is that people are searching on all kinds of phrases that, individually, are searched infrequently, but cumulatively, can add up to a very significant amount of traffic. (AltaVista has cited research claiming that 25 percent of searches are made only once.) If you look at the search engine referrer data in the log file analysis report for any well optimized site, you'll see what we mean.
So how do we optimize for myriad unknown keyword phrases that people are searching? The answer is to open up or liberate your pages to them. This is explained in our discussion of
The Search Engine-friendly Site. In a nutshell, it's about 1) ensuring the copy on your pages can be readily read and indexed by search engines, and 2) making sure you have copy, and ideally lots of it, making use of synonyms and other ways of expressing your keywords. The first point must be dealt with in any case, but the second is not so obvious. It is certainly possible to take a page with sparse copy and optimize it for a given keyword phrase. But then there's little else to be gotten out of it. On the other hand, a page that is rich in words can be optimized for both specific keywords and any number of other relevant searches that perhaps include some of your keywords.
Expanding a site, adding new pages, is an effective way to improve your position in search engines. For example, rather than discussing three separate products on one page, better to have three separate pages, one for each, and offer more expansive information.
All other things being equal, sites with lots of accessible copy will do better in search engines than sites with sparse copy. This is especially true of the homepage, because search engines place special value on it. Yet we find so many homepages that have few if any words on them, or words that are part of images. And we find a lot of FLASH homepages.
Now let's discuss rank.
Unquestionably, the higher your ranking for a given keyword on search engine results, the more clickthroughs you’re going to get for it. As any direct mail marketing pro could tell you, every incremental effort required of a prospect means significant drop off. With search engines, you want to be on the first page of results. You want to be as high as possible on the first page before the user has to scroll. You want the top position!
A representative from Google recently told us that 80 to 85 percent of its searches do not look beyond the first page of search results. All true. But this doesn’t mean there’s no value to be had when you’re not on page one of results. In fact, we know there’s significant value. We know this from log file analysis of numerous clients, which tells us precisely how many site visitors come from specific search engines from searching on specific search terms.
A few related points concerning Google's statistic:
Firstly, in a typical month, Internet users conduct at least nine billion searches. That’s a huge number, It means that 1.35 billion to 1.8 billion searches a month go beyond the first page of results. Not at all insignificant.
Secondly, understand that the "80 to 85 of percent searches" is not necessarily 80 to 85 percent of the searches for your specific keywords, especially the more specific, relevant keyword phrases. Most users are not very good at searching (though this should improve over time as Internet users become more savvy). How else can you explain, for example, the some 350,000 searches a month for "insurance,", or 1.6 million searches a month for "used cars". So many searches are conducted on single words or very broad terms that could not possibly yield anything of value to the searcher. Our hypothesis is that many users start out with an inappropriately broad search, discard it immediately when they see what it yields, and then get more specific. If this is true, as we’re certain it is, you can see how that 80 to 85 percent statistic is not accurate to a sophisticated SEO campaign, to the keyword phrases that are important to you.
Thirdly, if the first page of search results does not provide what users are looking for, they will either refine the search or look beyond the first page. This means you, as a commercial site, won't be overlooked if the first page of results for your relevant search phrase is mostly government, media and non-profit organization sites which rank high because they tend to have a lot of links. For example, if someone is looking to buy a product to help them quit smoking, just about any relevant search will turn up a lot of government and information-based sites. Most searchers won't just give up just because the first page of results are not what they're looking for.
The Essence of SEO
Search engine algorithms, which determine page ranking in search results, are highly complex. They're not published and we're not aware that anyone has ever successfully reverse-engineered one. In addition, search engines frequently tweak or change their algorithms. They have gotten more complex over time to prevent people from influencing search results. You could say that search engines are in an arms race with optimizers.
Nevertheless, through our own experience and the collective experience of our industry, there is much we do know about what search engines consider important in ranking pages.
We know general principles, such as the importance of links, the importance of the title tag, that you want your keywords in the first third of your title tag or your body copy. We also know specifics, such as which engines are case sensitive and which are not, which index the description meta tag and which do not. At any given point in time we can know that Google, for example, favors a keyword density ratio (KDA) in the visible text of about 3 percent while Hotbot favors a KDA of about 2 percent. (Keyword density ratio refers to the number of times a keyword appears, for example, in the visible body text compared to all the other words, expressed as a percent. Thus, if there are 200 words on the page and your keyword appears six times, its keyword density is 3 percent.)
With the use of specialized software tools, we can also analyze your competition—for example, the top 10 sites on Google or any other search engine for "keyword xyz," and optimize your page against them. In analyzing your competition, we look at both on-page and off-page factors, or page content and link position.
In analyzing page content, we look at, among other things, the keyword density ratios of your keywords on your competitors' pages. The HTML code that generates a Web page is comprised of various kinds of tags that define page components, such as headings and subheadings, regular body copy, links (the text that is hyperlinked as well as the link itself), and what an image is about (alt tags). There's also the
title and meta tags that convey information to search engines.
Here's a spreadsheet that illustrates a
keyword density analysis of the top 10 sites on Google for what we'll call "keyword xyz." You can see that it lists various counts and keyword density ratios (expressed as a percent), for the various tags, such as the title tag and description meta tag, the header tags, body tag, link tags, etc. Also note the two tables under Whole and Sum. If the keyword was a single word, these two tables would be identical, but since the keyword is a phrase with multiple words, we need to analyze the ratios for both the phrase in its entirely and in terms of its component parts.
While all this may look sophisticated, it's actually vastly simple compared to all the factors counted in search engine algorithms. In fact, we've developed a proprietary spreadsheet analysis that looks at far more complex relationships than are shown here. What we want to show you, however, is that search engines place different values on the different page components, and each search engine has its own values. Google may like to see at least 600 words on a page whereas AltaVista may like to see 300. It may be positive to have a keyword density ratio (KDR) of 50 percent in your title tag, but you'll surely be penalized if your visible body text has a KDR of 50 percent. So it's not a matter of having higher KDRs than your competitors, but in having the right KDRs.
The second column in the spreadsheet, Links, is the number of inbound links the page has. Links are one of the most important factors in search engine rankings, but you can see that it's not the only factor. The page in the first position has fewer links than all but two of the other nine.
Quantity of links is not the only factor. Also important is quality of links, and we have tools to analyze this in detail as well. In general, links from pages that have similar content rate higher with search engines than do those from pages that appear less relevant. Here are some factors concerning links to your site that search engines may take into account:
- If the visible text in the link to your site contains your keyword.(Thus, it's quite an advantage to have your most effective keyword in your site/domain name.)
- If the page linking to your site has a good keyword density ratio for your keyword in its title tag.
- If the page linking to your site has a good keyword density ratio for your keyword in the visible body text.
- If the page or site linking to your site itself enjoys a good link position, i.e., many other sites of relevant content link to it.
- If the site linking to your site is not in the same Class C block as your IP address. (For example, in our DNS, 216.205.146.134, the bolded numbers indicate the Class C subnet.) If it is, the search engine devalues it because it may belong to you. Thus, if you do create a separate site and want to get maximum value from the links between them, they should be hosted in different locations.
Having evaluated and affirmed your opportunity for SEO, having identified the relevant and popular keyword phrases that will bring targeted visitors to your site, having analyzed your competition, and armed with the knowledge of what is important to the various search engines, we must now implement a program that will maximize your site's visibility in search engines.
SEO Strategies & Tactics
Before implementing, we first need to develop a overall strategy that accounts for your current site situation.
We need to map the keywords to be optimized to specific pages on your site, which we'll eventually rewrite to optimize for your keywords. In some cases we recommend creating new pages. Our strategy may also address site design, architecture and navigation issues. We may suggest adding a site map so that search engine spiders can better find and access pages at lower levels of the site hierarchy. We may suggest adding a links page, to be able to offer link exchanges as part of building your inbound link position.
In our essay About Search Engines we discussed the search engine-friendly site and said that many sites are either unfriendly to search engines or completely impenetrable to them due to the use, or inefficient use, of such things as frames, Flash, JavaScript, and image maps. Especially, if you want to be well positioned in search engines, you need to use words on your site, and not words as part of images.
To make your content more accessible to search engines, we may recommend some rearchitecting of your HTML, which may or may not effect what users see, For example, take the JavaScripts out of your pages and put them in different files. Or rearrange the table structure in your code so that your rich content will be read first by search engines instead of last. Or take your site out of frames and put it in ASP (active server pages), which can be read by search engines.
Every Web site is a unique challenge. How flexible you can be about making changes to your site will determine what strategy we recommend.
If your site is impenetrable to search engines and you're unwilling to change this, we may need to go off site in our tactics. For example, we might recommend building another site that can be highly optimized to feed visitors to your site. Another tactic could be to employ what is called cloaking. This involves having your server show one page to the Web user, and a different page to search engine spiders. It is achieved by knowing the IP addresses of the spiders and putting a special script on the server to manage it. You're not spamming the search engines as long as you're giving them the exact same content that the browsers see; in this case you're just enabling the search engines to see what humans see. This is a legitimate use of cloaking. Any other use is spamming. This is a controverial subject, but if you were to survey several respected professional search engine optimizers you'd find that most are against the use of cloaking. The most common rationalization given for cloaking by professional optimizers, which they consider legitimate, is the need to hide code from people who would steal it (called code jacking). But we think that's a slippery slope. As you can imagine, cloaking lends itself to being greatly abused.
When we meet with prospective clients we're often asked about tactics they've heard about such as cloaking, doorway pages and the use of invisible text (e.g., white text on a white background that is read by search engines but cannot be seen by users). A lot of these "tricks" are considered spam by search engines and put your site at risk of either being demoted in the rankings or removed outright from a search engine's index.
Google's
spam report page lists what it considers spam: hidden text or links, misleading or repeated words, cloaking, deceptive redirects, doorway pages, duplicate site or pages, and any page that doesn't match its description. There's also a category called "Other" because there are other ways to spam search engines, such as participating in link farms.
Link farms sprouted up when search engines started placing a lot of value on inbound links. Link farms cross-link all kinds of sites, typically for a price, that all have completely different content—one reason search engines favor links from sites with similar content. In analyzing our clients' competition, we often find invisible link farms whereby a Web developer links all its clients to each other through invisible links in the HTML code. This is easy to do by simply hyperlinking a one-pixel clear image, for example. When we find these we report the spam to the major search engines to eliminate our client's competition.
You may surmise then, that it's not a good idea to engage in SEO tactics that are both egregious and flagrant spam. Businesses with no attachment to or equity in a particular domain name may be able to afford to take these risks, but most established brand marketers should not.
The truth is that you really don't need to use tactics that, if caught, could get your site penalized or banned. They offer no advantages over perfectly legitimate techniques over than serving as short cuts to save time and money. To sites that have equity in their domain names, the short cuts are not worth the risk. There is no substitute for having a site that is rich is good relevant content that can be fully and legitimately optimized for high rankings.
This assumes you can compete on links. For most client SEO programs, an important focus is strengthening their link position by acquiring as many relevant, high-quality links as possible.
The relative ability to do so is another determinant in the overall SEO strategy. Oftentimes this is not a problem when your competitors are your actual business competitors: other commercial sites similar to your own. If this is the case, we can usually acquire the same kinds of links they've acquired, or simply build a stronger position through expertise and effort.
However, sometimes your search competitors are a lot of non-commercial sites that enjoy numerous high-quality links, such as government sites, media sites, non-profit organizations and non-commercial information or portal sites. If this is a problem, joining link farms, invisible or otherwise, is not going to be very helpful. Better to work on your own content and try to get links from relevant sites based on the merit of your content. Or possibly build a non-commercial information site that a greater number of sites will be willing to link to, optimize that site and promote your commercial site or product on it.
Our essay,
A SE Marketing Program outlines the various executables in an SEO program. After optimizing pages, we may recommend using some express submission services whereby we pay certain search engines to index your pages more quickly than they otherwise would; for example, 48 hours versus two to three months with AltaVista. We also create and submit listings to directories if this has not already been done.
Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. There's always room to improve rankings for your keywords. We take our best shot when we first optimize and submit pages, but invariably some keywords will rank well immediately while others will not. So there's constant tweaking. In addition, one needs to maintain rankings because search engines are themselves always tweaking or changing their algorithms. The impact usually isn't dramatic, but if you don't pay attention your high rankings will slip away over time.
Measurement & Accountability
Search engine optimization is very measurable. Every month we run two reports for our clients: Keywords Ranking and Log File Analysis.
The Keywords Ranking report tells you where your site currently ranks on the most important search engines (or any search engines we choose) for the specific keyword phrases we've optimized for. The report also indicates any improvement or decline in rankings for these keywords from the prior month's report. And it tells you the specific Web page that has scored the ranking. Pretty straight forward.
Far more useful and indicative of what is being achieved is the Log File Analysis report, because search engine marketing is really about getting targeted prospects visiting your site. This report provides a lot of detail on the kind of traffic your site's getting, though we're primarily concerned with what it's getting from search engines.
A log file analysis report tells you the visits you're getting from specific search engines as well as the specific searched phrases that brought visitors to your site. To see what this looks like, here are links to sample reports from
WebTrends Log Analyzer, the leading log analysis program, and to
123LogAnalyzer, which we like because it lacks all the bells and whistles of WebTrends and is therefore faster to run. Depending on the sample report, view the Referrer & Keywords or the Search Engine Statistics.
Log file analysis is valuable in SEO because it can tell us such things as which keywords should be emphasized (e.g., work to improve their rankings) and perhaps new keywords to add.
|
