Consultant Top Tip Article, May 2004

Search Engine Optimization Tips
By WIC Member Patrina Mack and Bob Donnelly

If you are like many consultants, entrepreneurs, and small business owners, you have a Website and want to assure that it receives a high level of traffic. Although there are many ways to drive visitors to your site, “free” traffic from searches is something you can take advantage of now.

Search is one of the most important and active areas on the Internet today. Web users rely upon a variety of search engines every day to help them locate products and services. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of designing a Website to attain a higher rank on search engine results pages. The following article provides tips for implementing this process.

How Many Search Engines Do You Optimize For
A lot of effort is being spent on search today, and it is a highly contested market. Yahoo is starting to provide its own search results rather than relying upon Google, and Microsoft is expected to have its own search product sometime in late 2004. Various startups are also hoping to make inroads. This means that someday Google may not be the only answer, but today you want to optimize for Google.

Google is the “king of the hill.” Not only are more searches being done using Google on the Google Website, but Google provides results for other search engines. Most small Website owners cannot afford the luxury of optimizing for many search engines, so Google’s dominance makes optimizing for Google an easy choice.

Keyword Choice
Search is all about keywords. Websites contain text, search engine spiders index that text, and searchers enter keywords to find your site. Searchers are becoming more sophisticated in their use of keywords, with an obvious trend toward more multi-word searches.

Your Website must target keywords that do a minimum of two things:

• Describe what your site is all about
• Use commonly accepted words or phrases actually used by searchers

Your site must clearly articulate your business, using terms that searchers actually use. There is no point in optimizing for esoteric terms or slogans that nobody uses for search. Choosing keywords typically requires brainstorming to establish a list of candidates. Check competitors to see what they use. Then you must check the word popularity using a tool such as WordTracker or Overture, possibly identifying more popular alternatives, and focus on the most productive set of words. You may choose to eliminate some words because they are so highly competitive that you could never win the battle, or they are not sufficiently specific to provide your site with relevant visitors (example, “consultant”).

Keyword Use
It is important where you use keywords. While the ‘mantra’ is to have a site with significant textual content, some of the areas where keywords can be used are more important than others. A page title is extremely important; it is weighted generously, and potential visitors see it within the search results. Headings (HTML’s h1 and h2 tags) are also heavily weighted. Each link’s anchor text (a tag) is another important place to use keywords; this implies that you want something better than “click here” or “download.”

Quantity and proximity matter. Usage earlier within text can be of greater value than buried late in a page.

There are other places that, while not as valuable, should still not be overlooked. For instance, graphics within your Web page are not being indexed even if they look like text. By using the image (img) tag’s alt attribute, you can replicate the text, allowing it to be indexed.

It is important to remember that your Website has two audiences: the human site visitor who you hope will buy something and the search spider that indexes the site. Simply jamming keywords into your text is counterproductive if they help your ranking but your page reads so poorly that you immediately lose your potential customer.

Meta Tags
Meta tags are constructs appearing in the head of the HTML file. Some still serve a purpose for search engine optimization, while others have outlived their usefulness.

As mentioned previously, the title tag is very important. Do not waste an opportunity by using a title such as “home page.”

The description is useful in a different way. For many search engines, when your site shows up in a search results page, what the potential visitor sees is the first part of your description. The purpose of the description is to entice potential visitors to follow your link instead of going to the next search result. A description should use keywords, but its primary goal is to make the page sound interesting enough to view.

The keywords tag was only important up until a few years ago. At this point, it is generally irrelevant.

Links
An important part of Google’s page rank is determined by links to your Website. The more quality links you have to your site, the better your page rank index, because not all links are created equal. For example, if you have a financial planning firm, then a link from your friend’s hobby site or a site containing nothing but many links is not helpful to your Website’s page rank index.

Having links to your site from other sites that are known to search engines is important for a number of reasons. Their importance reflects upon your site’s perceived importance. When search engines can find your site, it lets you avoid having to continually submit your site. You avoid the “we’ll submit your site to thousands of search engines on a regular basis” game. Search engines expect to be able to locate your site on their own, requiring that your site has links to it from other sites that already get spidered. Some search engines, though not Google, offer paid inclusion which ensures that a particular page is known to the search engine spider while you continue to pay to have the page included. This ensures timely spidering of the page, but it provides no guarantee of a favorable page rank.

Design Considerations
Various features prevent search engine spiders from properly indexing sites. Since they are concerned with text, relying on technologies such as Flash or just graphics images results in text not being seen. The spiders will not go to pages requiring login or to pages whose addresses clearly show they are dynamically served. Frames are not only difficult for users to bookmark but are also to be avoided when possible for search engines. JavaScript pulldown menus are problematic, and links within imagemaps won’t be followed. (Site maps provide an obvious workaround.) As a general rule, pages should be accessible from the home page within a couple of links. Also, it must be possible to navigate your site from any page that could be the visitor’s landing page.

Other Considerations
Various questionable search engine optimization techniques have been abused over the years and are now recognized as spam. Search engines ignore some such techniques and penalize others. You don’t want to use obsolete games such as using invisible text. You also don’t want to get caught using doorway or cloaked pages. Google’s webmaster guidelines are very helpful if you are unsure about the ethics of any method.

There are many aspects of search engine marketing beyond simply doing SEO for your site. Search engines’ natural results provide one way for visitors to find your site. There are also pay-per-click campaigns that can offer more immediate results but require close management. There are also questions about what happens when a visitor finds your site. Does the landing page generate interest? Can they find what they need? Do they do whatever it is that you want them to do? These are simply some other factors for you to consider.

Patrina Mack is the founder and managing partner at Vision & Execution, a marketing consulting firm specializing in business planning and marketing strategy from business and/or product conception through launch. Vision & Execution helps clients determine the most profitable ways of providing value to their customers so they can rapidly gain market presence and sales momentum. Patrina can be reached at pmack@VisionAndExecution.com.

Bob Donnelly is a partner at Vision & Execution (V&E). He provides a wide variety of technical expertise for V&E, including search engine optimization (SEO). Bob can be reached at bdonnelly@VisionAndExecution.com.