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.