In-Depth

Start Your Search Engines

Search-engine optimization is serious business. If you're doing it wrong, you're probably leaving money on the table.

• By Keith Ward
• December 01, 2006

Typing the phrase "desktop computer" into Google on an October afternoon yields the following on the first results page: The top natural (non-paid) listing is a CNET review article. Result No. 2 is a link to TigerDirect.com, an electronics retailer's site. Other first-page entries include articles from HowStuffWorks.com and Digg.com, a Wikipedia entry and the Geeks.com homepage.

Notice anything missing? How about Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, Apple, Alienware and all the other major vendors?

Another test: Typing in the search string "Microsoft Dynamics resellers Maryland" (where I live) returns no results for Microsoft Dynamics resellers in Maryland until page four of the listings (Protech Associates Inc., a Gold Certified Partner based in Columbia, Md.). Maybe even more shocking was when I broadened the search scope to just "Microsoft Dynamics resellers," with no location limitation. Exactly one reseller was listed on the first page.

That's the problem with search-engine optimization (SEO), which is something like the old joke, often attributed to Mark Twain, about the weather: Everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.

The reality is that most companies know about SEO and many do the most basic fiddling with their sites to improve their rankings (and, hence, their visibility), but few devote any serious resources to improving SEO, thus essentially leaving potential bucketfuls of money on the table. "I would say that 70 percent to 80 percent [of companies] don't use SEO properly," says Mike Murray, vice president of Fathom SEO, a search-engine marketing and placement company based in Valley View, Ohio.

MarketingSherpa Inc., an Internet marketing research company based in Warren, R.I., has put hard data behind those kinds of estimates. For a recent report, MarketingSherpa compared about 144 small ISVs and 60 large, well-known ISVs. Analysts searched homepages using key phrases by which a company defined itself-for instance, searching for "defragmentation" for a company that makes disk defragmentation software. What they found was eye-opening, says Stefan Tornquist, MarketingSherpa's research director. "Even among the elite, we found that less than half were on the first page of natural search results. That number dropped to less than a quarter for smaller companies."

Even when companies know where and how to start, SEO often doesn't continue past those beginning stages. Murray says that most companies know how to do SEO basics such as titles, keywords, headers and site descriptions, but often don't go much beyond that. Even with those basics, it's important to pay attention to small details to prevent a variety of problems. Companies often "write the title too long, or put in too many keywords and get greedy," Murray says. "People aren't doing it really well."

Who's overseeing Your SEO?
One reason for that lack of success is that the wrong people may be in charge of SEO. "In a lot of companies, the folks that actually do the optimization probably aren't in the marketing department. It's likely to be someone in the Web-design group or someone in IT," Tornquist says. "It's probably not someone with the right training. Marketing and technology work together well for the companies that do it right. IS or IT can't be expected to do this itself." That's why Tornquist stresses the need for much better collaboration in most companies.

Another option is going outside your company to hire an SEO specialist. "If you're the kind of company that's seeing a high percentage of traffic coming in from searches, there's probably an ROI argument" for having a full-time SEO person, Tornquist says. If you go this route, seek candidates with strong writing skills as well as marketing and public relations experience.

A middle route is hiring a consultant, someone like Murray of Fathom SEO. Murray recounts his experience with a smaller client that sells industrial supplies. Fathom did a significant amount of work on the client's site, including much rewriting of its content. But the effort was worthwhile for the client, Murray says, noting that site traffic from search engines tripled in eight months, going from 3,000 to 9,000 hits per month.

Developing your SEO Strategy
Successful SEO hinges on having a solid strategy. Rather than implementing a few changes here and there, ignoring SEO for a time, then revisiting the results in six months-the way many companies approach rankings-it's far more effective to have a game plan from the outset. But don't expect instant miracles, either. Notice that the Web site traffic didn't increase overnight in Murray's example. Slow and steady growth should be your goal.

"If you're going after a competitive market, you have to have a strategy; you need follow-through," says Murray. "If you're No. 22 in [a search engine] ranking, you need to find out what it will take to get to No. 18, then to 14, then to eight. It's like going to a chiropractor; you need little adjustments."

Those adjustments might be as small as tinkering with some verbiage. Consider rewording a few paragraphs on a product page and see what happens to the rankings.

And after doing that, don't stop the adjustments or assume that SEO is ever a finished job: Keep right on making adjustments. Remember, SEO is always a work in progress. The effort "has to be ongoing," Murray says, recommending that you make a few changes at a time. "You can work on page titles for awhile, then do descriptions. Don't try to do it all at once," he cautions.

But where to begin with these incremental adjustments? If you're short on time, Murray suggests starting with your homepage, the location best known to search engines.

And go beyond just reworking words. For instance, watch out for graphics that contain no searchable text and therefore could easily be missed by search spiders. Murray recalls another client that had a graphic at the top of its site (where search engine spiders typically start). Murray added the following searchable text to the graphic itself: "For assistance with [specific product names], call this phone number."

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Searching for Answers Google comes up first for all of our respondents.

Of course, if you're not currently doing any SEO, taking even a few basic steps can make a huge difference. A national electronics retailer that Murray worked with saw a 100 percent increase in Web site traffic in just four months after beginning SEO because it had previously ignored the practice.

Most sites won't see that dramatic an increase so quickly, so it's important not to get discouraged if your site's site-traffic and search-engine rankings increase slowly. As Bill Cava, CTO of Ektron Inc., a Web content management provider and Gold Certified Partner in Amherst, N.H., points out: "Think of the volume of Web sites. The reality of being in the top 10 in a Google search is tough. To expect to be [first or second] on a particular keyword is a tough proposition. Look at your numbers and go back to the metrics. If you've got 30,000 unique visitors, have as a goal to double that number."

That can happen if you pay consistent, careful attention to your Web site's content. "If you want a successful Web site, you have to deliver good content, period," Cava says. "The first thing on the list [for successful SEO] is making sure your content is meeting demand from users."

Cava knows what he's talking about. For five years before joining Ektron, he was an architect for Lycos, one of the original search engine titans.

"Often, people overlook the value of content-management systems in site rankings," Cava says. "It's valuable to have a tool to update content and keep it fresh. If you're featuring a tip of the month that sits there for half a year, it's not only bad for users," it's also bad for the site because search engines lower a site's ranking if the content is stale.

His company's flagship CMS product, CMS400.NET, for instance, has a refresh report that notifies SEO personnel when content has been sitting too long. That's the kind of functionality to look for in your company's content-management system.

It's also important to put content in precisely the right places-the places where it's most likely to be found by search engines, Murray says: "You want to pick out the right keywords and get them up high on the page, as search spiders start at the top left. They don't normally start at the bottom of a page or on the right side. You want the first words on your page to be search terms."

There are plenty of ways to keep that content fresh-and your search engine rankings high-even if you're, say, an ISV with one major product, which would normally mean fairly static content. For starters, consider joining the blog revolution.

"People are reading blogs," says Cava. "Roughly every six months, the number of blogs doubles. You'll see that blogs often contain links"-which are the other critical factor in SEO. For those reasons, Cava recommends adding a blog to your Web site. "It doesn't need to have scathing opinion; it can just chronicle interesting links in your industry," he says. "People say 'Joe Smith really keeps up on what's happening in the dog food industry'; so they check his blog. People naturally link to those sites, and give attribution. Blogs are a solid way to get quality links."

That's important because inbound links-that is, links from another site that point to your site-are the second-most important factor in search engine rankings. "Even if you have one blog post, and see a slight uptick in traffic, if you extrapolate that and target particular keywords, it's going to grow that traffic," Cava says.

Also consider the value of syndication via Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which is a way to push blog headlines and content to visitors who opt in to receive that information. "The syndication aspect is a very powerful way of getting messages out there," Cava says. It's another way to feed juicy flies to search engine spiders, and keep them coming back for more.

And in most cases, it's not necessary to completely overhaul a site to dramatically improve the rankings.

"People often think [SEO] is more work than it is," Cava says. But it is important to consistently track your traffic, and how it corresponds with those occasional content changes on your site. If, for instance, you sell scripting software, try changing a phrase on your homepage from "scripting software" to "scripting and automation software" and see what happens to your rankings and traffic.

Or consider this idea from Cava: Try a new word in a blog and track it on a daily basis. Over time, you can watch trends and get metrics on whether things are improving or on the decline in terms of Web traffic.

Paid vs. Free rankings
There is, of course, another way to ensure that you show up on the first page of rankings: pay-per-click ads. The question is how effective sponsored ads are. Tornquist, of MarketingSherpa, believes that using paid ads works if done judiciously. "The vast majority of attention and clicks goes to natural search results, but it's worth doing both," he says. "With paid ads, you get a good idea of the effectiveness of the ad. Paid search is expensive, but it does give you the opportunity to stake a claim early in the results."

Although paid ads can work, a 2004 study by Enquiro Search Solutions Inc., a business-to-business search marketing company based in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, shows that fewer than 20 percent of searchers click on sponsored links (see "Searching for Answers," p. 33). That means that the majority of your effort should be geared toward making your Web site's content more search-engine friendly.

When deciding what placement to stake out for paid ads, consider that more than 14 percent of respondents to the Enquiro survey clicked only on the top sponsored ads, with fewer than 4 percent clicking on sponsored ads on either side of the page.

No matter where your SEO efforts stand, try not to be daunted by search-engine optimization. Sure, if you're a small ISV or custom computer builder, you may be one of 1,000 possible Web sites that can come up in a search-engine listing-but, unlike the weather, you can do something about it.