By Tracy Welsh, South River
Technologies (Published April 2, 2007)
When search engine optimization (SEO) hit the air and Web waves,
I thought getting a high placement on the most popular engines would
be a simple matter. They must search each other, I figured, so content
that appears on the first page of one engine would eventually appear
on the first page of the others. Without the resources to hire SEO
help, I had to learn by myself how wrong I was.
My thought process began with a cursory look at which search engines
get the most traffic. Google, not surprisingly, gets the lion’s
share, followed by Yahoo, while MSN runs a distant third. Others
get only a small percentage, so I concentrated on these three. First,
I identified keywords that customers might use to find our firm.
If you are going to optimize your site for good keyword placement,
you need to determine the keywords that you want to optimize. I
ran some “test searches” on the keywords I had identified
and the results were rather disheartening.
As I delved deeper into the effort, I realized the complexity of
the SEO concept. I wanted to understand how search engines determine
placement, and why something that places well in one may not do
well in another.
MSN is fairly simple and likes to see a good amount of text on
a page, usually at least 200 words with important keywords near
the top. It also emphasizes use of the site’s “Description”
meta tag, prominent use of keywords, and text that is useful to
readers. With this in mind, I noted how our MSN placement was boosted
each time I updated our Web site content. MSN, like most other search
engines has very sophisticated indexing capabilities, so trying
to “trick” the search engine by repetition or hiding
text (such as white on white) can get you banned from the service.
Like MSN, Yahoo uses page text, description tag, and also a “Title”
meta tag. Some Web sites put the company name in this tag, but it
is valuable real estate for keywords. Rather than having “South
River Technologies” as our title, we used “Secure File
Transfer and WebDAV Document Collaboration.” The company name
is displayed on the home page, so repeating it in the browser’s
title bar isn’t necessary.
Even with these and other content changes, our listings on Yahoo
stubbornly refused to move up! It turns out that Yahoo does not
like Web sites that use PHP, the scripting language that dynamically
builds the content of each page and can confuse the search engine.
When we rebuilt the site using straight HTML, our placement in Yahoo
soared from being lower than the first 20 pages of results to pages
three through six. Moving away from PHP helped our placement in
other search engines also, but most significantly in Yahoo.
Google is even more complex and factors in criteria such as site
traffic and the number of links you have, so placement can improve
when customers, partners, and associates to link to your site. Google
also has a complex algorithm that changes frequently, so keywords
would show up on pages two and three can suddenly plummet to page
14.
Google offers a paid keyword service called Google Adwords. Your
listing shows in its “sponsored links” column and you
pay for each click. Google Adwords has a nice tool for writing alternate
ads for a keyword. Google rotates the ads, and displays the one
getting the best response. You can target your ads by country and
by region. This can be a good supplement – some of your target
keywords will already be placing well, so use paid keywords to boost
the performance of those keywords that are not doing as well.
As it does for many technology companies, a strong presence on
the Web is critical to our success. About 40 percent of our revenue
is generated from online sales, and nearly half of our direct sales
leads originate on the Web. Even with this modest, in-house SEO
effort, online sales increased by 32 percent between 2005 and 2006,
a 14 percent increase over the previous year.
Sure, there are benefits to hiring an SEO consultant, but in cases
where there is more time than budget available, you can have a positive
impact on search engine placement with a little research, a commitment
to continually improving site content, and a need to track the results.
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