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.

SO HOW DO YOU OPTIMISE?

“If you try and make it easier for your visitor it will often be easier for the search engines as well.” Tom Petryshen, Amplify.

It’s commonly agreed by most in the industry that the foundation of a successful optimisation program involves three key elements: content, layout and links.

Content: When you go to a search engine the most common way to search for something is by entering certain “keywords” that hint at what you might be after. So a Web site owner first of all needs to do a bit of reverse engineering and work out the keywords its customers actually use.

“In the first place, Web pages must contain the words and phrases that the potential customers and site visitors type into search queries,” says Thurow. Making sure the content you have on your Web site matches up with the way that your audience queries for your product or services is critical. And this means that you need to know how your audience is looking for your product or service.

A great example of this, says Tom Petryshen, CEO of Web consultancy firm Amplify, is the health cover industry. “Many health insurance companies refer to their product as ‘health cover’, while on the consumer side people are searching for something totally different called ‘health insurance’. If you optimise yourself for health cover you are going to miss all the people looking for the keyword insurance. There is disconnect between what they’re calling the product and what consumers are looking for.”

Information architecture and layout - the technicalities: The second component of optimisation, Thurow says, is that: “search engines must have easy access to the keyword phrases that are placed on each Web page. A site’s navigation scheme, cross-linking, and URL structure (Web address) gives search engines easy access to content. How information is organised on a Web page communicates which content you feel is important.”

Things such as Flash-formatted welcome screens are regularly highlighted as search engine unfriendly. The spiders cannot read the content and so will not index anything presented in Flash, regardless of its relevancy to your business.

But this doesn’t mean you should abandon your Web site to being pure text. At the end of the day you’re trying to sell something, says Petryshen. “You have to have a balanced design. You want to be able to make sure that once you attract that visitor you can actually convert them, and that’s done with a balanced design (that may well include Flash), good navigation amd open architecture, so that the search engine and the visitor can get through to whatever goals you’ve set up for them—to fill in a form, request more info, download software or a PDF. If you try and make it easier for your visitor it will often be easier for the search engines as well,” he says.

What has often been the case in the past is that the Web site gets designed from a purely technical point of view while the optimisation, marketing and promotional aspects of the site are neglected. Web site developers are certainly far more astute now than in recent years. The focus of Web sites has shifted towards more user friendly pages, but it is an emphasis that can constantly be reassessed over time.

Links—the popularity contest: According to Thurow: “Link development is the number and quality of external, third-party links pointing to a Web site. In other words, objective third parties must feel that your site’s content is valuable and link to it appropriately. Link quality is far more important than quantity.”

The Internet is a popularity contest. A link is like a vote, says Petryshen. “Some Web sites that link to you will pass on more credibility than others. If you get a link from a large news site or from Yahoo, this is going to pass on credibility to your site.”

What makes this attractive for search engines is that you can’t control the number of links that people will have for your site, so they see this as advocacy of your site.

But acquiring links can be consuming. You need to budget, says Petryshen. “You could spend a lot of time going out and acquiring links but the quality of those links are generally going to be low. It’s best to keep a broad approach—trade with people in your industry, get in the directories, do some PR and get links that way. You need links coming from different sources that are relevant to your industry.”

As the importance of links became more widely known, a strategy called “link farming” emerged to take advantage of it. Usually undertaken by automated programs that create thousands of links to a page, the process was quickly frowned upon by the likes of Google.

A site that participates in a link farm is most likely to have its rankings quickly penalised; Google recommends that Webmasters only seek out links that are relevant to their sites.

Bruce Arnold, director of Internet research and analytics firm Caslon, says the way to really see benefit is not through quick fixes. If you want to have a high ranking with Google the way to do it is to have real content, content that’s refreshed periodically, that is useful and easily accessed, and to get linked to by other sites that Google considers credible.

A problem with most company Web sites, says Thurow, is that they do not have this strong foundation. “Many Web site owners create sites without any consideration for Web site usability, basic design principles and a thorough knowledge of different types of search behaviour,” she says.

While this might seem fairly logical, for many businesses there remains a gap between knowing this, and actually achieving it. One way of getting hold of concrete numbers that can really help your site is through Web analytics.

The great beauty of the Web environment, says Geoff Johnson, research vice president at Gartner, is that it is a rational process. “With Web analytics, if you tweak something you can see (all other things being equal and they often are not) and measure what difference it makes.”

WEB ANALYTICS

Web analytics is a key way to help understand your audience and how it interacts with your site. It enables you to know where your traffic is coming from and can help you understand where your money is being spent and if it’s actually paying off.

It can also show you exactly how optimisation efforts impact on traffic through your site. Google, for example, has recently made a sophisticated analytics service available for free, and the information that can come out of it can be a revelation for a Web site, but despite this it tends to 
remain overlooked.

“There are a lot of companies that are online that still aren’t tracking,” says Amplify’s Petryshen. “There are some really big names, which is quite shocking. All they’re doing is spending money driving people to their Web site without really doing any tracking or analytics.

“Today you can measure this. It can all be clarified for you in black and white so there is no excuse,” he says.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Elevating your results in the organic search engines results pages (SERP) is what optimising is all about—no one would argue that being number one has great advantages. But despite the good advice that comes from those interested in SEO, there have been some high profile examples of “black hat” techniques—essentially cheating in the eyes of the search engine.

In January, Google penalised car manufacturer BMW’s German Web site for using doorway pages—additional pages filled with keyword phrases that attract the search engine but redirect human visitors to another page (somewhat less friendly to the search spiders). Google’s response was to drop BMW’s PageRank to zero, meaning for many searches it would be far from the top.

It highlights that even now, SEO as an industry and market is still in its infancy—and it is an industry. Since the late 1990s people began realising that making changes to a Web site could affect its position on the SERP. In the last five years there has been an explosion in the number of businesses offering services in this area.

But the temptation to take some easy options is sometimes powerful. And despite real excitement about the benefits that SEO has to offer, examples like BMW (not just small and unknown companies) are still frequent enough to cast an uneasy light over optimisation strategies, and occasionally suspicion over proponents of it.

According to Gartner: “Unprofessional practices are not uncommon and threaten to damage the reputation of the entire industry. They are a frequent topic at conferences and discussed on industry Web sites, blogs and publications.”

Arnold likens a lot of SEO to the dot-com bubble a few years ago. “People were flogging the idea that there are quick fixes about how to be found on the Internet—that there are quick fixes to making money. In those days it was the magic domain name.”

He is also suspect of SEOs effectiveness, saying it is often greatly overrated. He suggests the advice out there is not anything more than good Web design.

“Its not clear that [consultants] are really doing anything more than advising you to do things like refresh your content, encourage people to link to your site, and actually have some real content on your site—this is all very nice but we’re not really talking rocket science here,” he says.

“You could well use your money better elsewhere. It’s just not cost effective. If you wanted recognition of your site you might well be better off using this money to do things like guerrilla advertising and so on. The SEO people might sneer at this, but in terms of consumer recognition and bang for your buck that might well be far more effective.

“People don’t always find Web sites just through search engines—they are very important yes, but so are things like print ads, business cards, t-shirts, etc. There is no single fix to point people in the right direction,” says Arnold.

SO IS IT WORTH WHILE?

Reputable consultants in the field urge that it is not through devilry or the “black hat” techniques that a Web site will see benefit. Indeed the search engines are becoming far more adept at detecting and punishing Web sites that operate such strategies. The very success of Google is testimony to its ability to actually return useful results.

Petryshen points out that the benefits of optimising varies with every industry, but there can be a real difference. “We’ve seen it return amazing results, in some cases even millions in revenue a month, and that’s in Australia. If you look at some of the bigger markets it’s probably more. There is a lot of money being made online and ultimately, if you’re doing it right, you see the results,” he says.

It really becomes a fundamental question of whether your site actually is a good quality site or not, and what sort of importance you see it having for your business. Optimising your site stems from good design, and while it may not be rocket science, tuning it based on real information—analytics—makes it scientific at the very least.

Search engine optimisation might boil down to be strategically applied common sense but with the vast majority of Internet surfers using search engines it cannot be ignored. If your customer doesn’t find you, he finds your competitor, and the difference between the two of you might be no more than a well-tuned Web site.

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Technology & Business is Australia's premier enterprise technology title, providing useful and high-quality news, reviews, analysis, interviews and opinion on issues key to Australian business and IT leaders. Technology & Business is the only title to provide independent lab testing and analysis of enterprise products, looking not only at performance but also interoperability, future proofing, return on investment and service as testing criteria.

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