AB: All-Round Nice Guy

Search engine *what*? Yes, yes, sorry if I use too many ‘big words’ this month, but for a lot of businesses, ‘optimising’ your site so that it appears higher in the big search engines is well worth the effort.

So, up front: what is search engine optimisation? 

SEO (*much* easier to write than ’search engine optimisation’) is the process of preparing your web site so that it ranks higher on the search results page of a search engine. The aim is to be seen before your competition - and even though it may or may not result in more clicks through to your web site, at least you were *found* - from that position, you can work on ways to increase your conversion/click-through rate. If you consider the reverse position, where your web site does not feature at all for a given search, then trivial things like your conversion rate won’t matter at all if no-one can find you.

So how the heck to we make sure our site is featured prominently for any given search? And how do I make sure my site is listed before my competitor’s site?

Well, I’m glad you asked.  Read on…

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Putting it all into perspective

First up, we need to get a sense of perspective on the whole ‘SEO’ thing: optimising your site for better search engine results only works if you really *want* customers finding you via search engines.

I say that in all seriousness: many businesses don’t need to play the SEO game: direct marketing to a local area, or face-to-face marketing communications are far more successful in finding/keeping customers IF that’s the sort of business you’re in. So for local tradespeople, local/regional shops, or for highly personalised business services, there’s less need try to reach a mass audience and try and convert 1% of them into customers. The old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ has a new millenium conterpart: ‘one piece of direct marketing is worth 10,000 search engine visitors’. Essentially, if you can target customers in a direct method, then do it - your success rate will be far greater.

So if the first best source of customers is via direct marketing, then the second best is by referrals. If you can have other customers or other businesses rcommend your business, then that’s a fairly highly qualified lead - your ‘conversion rate’ turning referrals into customers should be pretty strong.

It’s only in last place that we find visitors who find your web site via search engines - you’re starting with people who probably haven’t heard of you before, who haven’t been to your web site ever, and who may or may not be realy ‘hot leads’ in the first place - maybe they’re just doing some research into what you make/sell, and aren’t actually ready to commit yet.

In an earlier article on web site statistics, one of the telling graphs about how wel your overall marketing is performing, is the breakdown of these three groups: direct customers, referrals, and visitors coming from search engines. As before, the right mix depends on your type of business, but in general, you’d want a good showing out of all three, not just with one sector strong, and the other two weak.

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The law of diminishing returns

One last thing about SEO before I tell you how to do it (gosh - is he *ever* going to get to it??) is that it follows the law of diminishing returns: ONE decent go at optimising your site will get you ahead of the game by a long way, whereas spending months on it or thousands of dollars on consultancy fees might not improve your rankings significantly past a certain point. It’s both a serious game and a serious industry - there’s lots of research that tells us that we really only scrutinize the first few results on the big search engines, the majority of the results get surprisingly little attention.

The up side, therefore, is to do a decent amount of optimising your site - either going back over your existing content, or incorporating these techniques when planning/refreshing your web site.

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Finally, the process.

Essentially, optimising your site is an effort in understanding why a search engine returns the results is does - making every effort to reverse engineer the process - and applying the lessons learnt to your own web site.

Here’s a long list of things that assist your site in climbing the search results. Think of them all as ‘one percent-ers’ in football: the more you can do, the better overall your web site will perform.

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Age of your site: sites under 12 months old or so are often ‘rated down’, even if they’re highly relevant to a given search. The answer is to get your web site up and running *now*, and slowly mould it into what you need it to be - don’t wait until everything is quiet, then launch your site.

Dynamic vs static sites: there’s great debate about static sites vs dynamic ones - the truth is that a great static (hand-coded) site *can* perform well, but it can also perform horribly. On the other hand, dynamic sites (or ‘web site frameworks’) like Wordpress et al, let you build whatever you need to build, but they are already internally optimised for most of the features on this list. 

Fresh content/lots of content: the big one. Not only is fresh content great for your marketing efforts (ie: you care, you’re current, you’re on the ball, etc) but you also increase the number of key words and key *phrases* that your target market is searching for. Gone are the days of loading your page with hidden keywords - that’s seriously *so* pre-2000 - ancient history in internet years. To be found, you have to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, and try to understand what key words and phrases they might be thinking when they’re looking for someone just like you. Now, you *could* just load up junk pages with random combinations of those words, BUT you’d be severely ranked down for needless repetition. No, the only way to BE found as the authoritative source of your customers’ needs and wants is TO BE the authoritative source of your customers’ needs and wants. That means pre-emptively writing regular, fresh content on the topic of your expertise, so that you slowly build up all the possible topics/key word/key phrases that your customers might be searching for - and when they find you, they’ll be able to see your passion for what you do. It’s a win-win. The open-source blogging engine like Wordpress, above, makes this constant content flow very easy indeed.

Links from other web sites: try to encourage links to your web site from other pre-eminent web sites. Sources include: industry associations, events you sponsor, online news sites, bloggers in the industry, fans, or lastly, parent/sister sites.

Human-readable URLs: for the published address of your site, the shorter the better, but for pages within your site, go long! Again, Wordpress makes this automatic, but if you can make your page addresses into mysite.com.au/myproduct/featureone.html, that’s impressive ‘Google juice’ as compared to ‘mysite.com.au/12345.html’.

Keyword-laden page titles and headings: the title of each page also needs to match up to the content on each page - don’t just keep the one page title across the whole site - you’re missing out on ‘catching’ variations on the key phrases that your customers might be looking for. Similarly, the major page heading on each page also carries a lot of weight as to key words/phrases - be descriptive!

Contact details on every page: forget the ‘contact us’ page - simply have all your contact details in the footer of *every page*, and put in your full ’suburb/state/country’, so that when your customers look for certain key words in your suburb/state/country, the search engine has a direct match, rather than trying to connect your key words with your suburb/state/country from another page.

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Above all, making your site more customer-friendly is guaranteed to boost both your search engine optimisation efforts as well as your overall marketing efforts. It’s not hard to refresh a web site with these features embedded, not is it hard to build a new site with these principles in mind - and when there’s a win-win for both sides, who can say no?

AB out