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.