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Search Engine Optimization
There are billions of web pages on the Internet. A search on a common term will return millions of results, and even a search on something quite specific, like the name of a business, can yield thousands of pages. Welcome to the World Wide Web. It’s a lot like a crowded market, where customers flock to the loudest barker on the block. As a small business owner with a modest web site, you may find it hard to get noticed. How do you rise above the hue and cry of all those other sites offering pretty much the same thing? Search Engine Optimization & TrafficEnter search engine optimization (SEO), a term so prosy it is practically inspired, meaning the practice of modifying web sites to get better search engine rankings and thus more traffic. Most small business web sites see the faintest flicker of traffic — certainly not enough to justify the long hours and thousands of dollars often invested in them. This fact of life on the Internet seems almost counterintuitive: after all, with millions of Internet users conducting billions of searches every day, there should be plenty of traffic to go around, right?
Wrong. The truth is, a relative handful of web sites get the lion’s share of all that search traffic. You’ve seen them: sites that always float to the top of the search results and somehow continue to populate those results even after you’ve refined your keywords in a fruitless attempt to weed them out. It’s safe to assume that most of these sites have been optimized for search engines. In fact, they’re designed as much for search engines as for people. The smart folks who built them may not be world-class graphic designers, and they may even stumble over their syntax, but they know a thing or two about how the search engines work. Their text-heavy, logically themed, well-linked pages are grist for the search engine mills, and the search engines, which always favor text over graphics, have rewarded their efforts by indexing those pages for certain keywords. Various combinations of those keywords, when called up in user searches, send traffic their way — sometimes a whole lot of it, depending on the keywords. A single optimized file can attract far more traffic than even the home page of its host site. The higher a site appears in search results, the more traffic it receives, as has been demonstrated time and again in studies on user behavior. Most users don’t click past the first page of results; roughly 80% of all users won’t venture beyond the top three or four listings returned. So where your site ranks for relevant keywords can mean all the difference between Internet riches and oblivion. On the Information Highway, just as in real estate, it’s all about location. Exceptional traffic from Google, Yahoo, and MSN is usually a testament to an ongoing campaign of search engine optimization, which involves a very different mindset from graphic design. As unfair as it may seem, a web site’s sexy interface has no value to a search engine. For some small business owners, what may be hard to swallow is that the graphic designer they hired at great expense to create site with all the bells and whistles is at a total loss when it comes to search engine strategies, and his Flash navigation, with all its delightful sound effects and rollover animation, is stopping the search engines cold. What We Can Do for YouIf you do a Google search on the name of your business — “Carla’s Catering,” for instance — what happens? Does your web site appear on the first page of results for this very specific phrase? If not, chances are that you’re not doing a whole lot better with any important keywords relating to your business. We’ll examine your server logs, keyword and competitor strategies, your HTML, the copy on your pages, and the way those pages are linked together to see where we can make improvements. We’ll look at meta tags, your directory structure, 404 error pages, and site maps. We’ll repair broken links and create crawler pages to help the search engines find buried content buried deep in your site. Finally, we’ll list your business in online directories so that your site has quality, inbound links. In many cases, we can double or triple existing traffic. When a site has good content that, with tweaking, will place high for several keywords, we can guarantee a huge jump in traffic, perhaps by several hundred visits a day. Now, having paid homage the power of keywords, let us say that we believe it’s a fool’s enterprise to optimize a site for a just a few keyword strings. What happens when a search engine suddenly changes its algorithm? The aggressive keyword strategy that once brought you thousands of visitors can suddenly work against you. Positioning your site for one or two highly competitive keywords strings can quickly turn into a full-time job, and you can be reasonably sure that many of your competitors will be vying for the top rank for those very same keywords. The name of the game, after all, is targeted traffic, and with this in mind, we will:
To Submit or Not to Submit?You may have heard it asserted that you need to submit your site to the major search engines. Perhaps you get regular spam mail from people who offer to do this for you, for a fee. Is it really worth the trouble? In a word, no. Search engines have spiders that crawl the Internet, busily cataloguing new pages and new sites. This is what the search robots do by design: like mad bargain hunters tracking down a yard sale, they scour the Internet for the most relevant information to place in their databases. It does no good to submit each new page to the search engines, flagging them as if to say, “We’re here!” In the not-too-distant past, one major search engine would actually penalize you for this tactic! A better approach is to create quality inbound links — in directories and related sites — which the search robots, in the course of their rounds, will then find and follow in. A notable exception to this rule is Open Directory, “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web, ...constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” The all-volunteer nature of Open Directory makes it a comparatively objective listing, untainted by commercial interests, of web sites of all stripe. Google looks to Open Directory first when it updates its database, and many directories pull their data directly from Open Directory, which explains why one Open Directory listing can appear on dozens of pages all over the Internet. Open Directory’s volunteer editors, while ultimately a blessing, can act with the sense of urgency sometimes characteristic of volunteers — that is to say, none. In fact, submitting a site to Open Directory is no guarantee that it will ever be listed, and we’ve found that persistence and even cajoling can have as much to do with a site’s acceptance into Open Directory as the merits of the site itself. ResourcesCase StudyRelated Links |
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