Courting Google

by Mark Wheeler, Technology & Business Magazine

In the days of online commerce, a key strategy to your success is search engine optimisation. But what exactly is SEO and how do you work with it? Mark Wheeler searches for answers on how to make your business stand out from the online crowd.

Unless your business has been hiding in a cave for the last 10 years, e-commerce is something you’ve probably been thinking hard about. The days of brochure-ware are gone—a good Web site can no longer be just a logo and a contact number; today a Web site has a far greater role to play.

But is your Web site tuned to suit your customer’s needs? Does it interact in rich ways with your customers and business partners? Does it have user-enabled services, can it reach right back into the supply chain and can it leverage against all the data and the systems you are running?

For most businesses these days an Internet presence is critical, and e-commerce has risen as an area of particular interest for many managers (see The blossoming of e-commerce). But with all of this investment how can you be sure that your site will be found in the first place? Or, as one analyst puts it, how can you be sure you’re lying on the right railway tracks?

When a potential customer Googles keywords that relate to your business, you want it to be likely they will encounter your Web site. But what about your competitors—will the customer find you before them? Not so sure anymore? Well you’re not alone in the cave.

SEARCH ENGINE POPULARITY

We are using search engines like never before; a boom is going on right now. According to MediaMetrix, 86 percent of Internet users visit search engine sites, and Gartner predicts that searches will continue to increase in importance for Internet users.

According to Nielson/NetRatings, online searches are growing 39 percent year on year in the US which, says chief analyst Ken Cassar, is simply because search as a utility is becoming ingrained in our lives.

HitWise Australia’s statistics show that the use of search engines in Australia has increased by almost 20 percent since the first week of January 2006.

The Yellow Pages used to be how we found what we were looking for but when was the last time you used those? In Australia, like most places, Google is the heavyweight. As of the start of June HitWise lists www.google.com.au as holding 78.6 percent of the search market, with search.ninemsn.com.au at about 7.6 percent and au.search.yahoo.com at 4.3 percent.

The simple truth is, says Gary Nu, sales and marketing director of E-Web Design and Marketing, “if you’re not up on Google, your Web site is basically under-utilised.”

To rate well on the search engines is clearly important. Google’s sacred algorithm assigns a numerical weight or value to each page of a Web site. Known as the PageRank, this value forms the basis of Google’s algorithm when it assesses the relevance of a Web page for a user’s keyword search. The pursuit of a better PageRank—and so a better listing on the results page of the search engine—has become a highly refined and debated issue, and an industry.

In the shadows of a resurgence in e-commerce, activity is a flourishing enthusiasm for what is known as search engine optimisation (SEO). The distinct goal of this is to improve the ranking of your Web site in search engine listings. What point is there of having a world-class Web site if it cannot be found?

Shari Thurow, managing director at Grantastic Designs, an SEO consultancy, and author of several SEO advice books, defines search engine optimisation as: “The designing, writing, coding, and scripting of a Web site to maximise the chance that its pages will appear at the top of spider-based search engine results for selected keyword phrases.”

Web sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN all use “spiders” or “crawlers” to trawl the Internet, indexing and cataloguing the pages of every Web site they find. When we search based on a selection of keywords a secret, complicated and constantly evolving algorithm maintained by the search engines such as Google and Yahoo evaluates at least 100 or more factors to determine the most relevant results to return for those keywords.