There is no point in building a website for your company if no one ever visits it, and getting visitors to your site is all about making it easier to find. According to the Netcraft Site Survey, as of September 2007 there were around 135 million active websites in the world, which means there’s a lot of competition out there vying for attention.
The main way in which people will find your site is through search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search. Ensuring that your site is on the first page of results when people search for your company name, and any other words that relate to your business, is absolutely vital if you’re going to attract traffic. But with all that competition out there, how do you ensure that happens?
The answer can be found through a number of techniques, collectively known as search engine optimisation (SEO). The aim of SEO is simple: to optimise your website so that it ends up high on the list of search results when people look for terms which relate to your company’s business. Without it, it could take years for the company’s site to drift up towards the top of the search engine rankings; time which your business probably doesn’t have.
Do it yourself?
There are plenty of companies around who will offer to give you advice and help with SEO and, if you are running a large-scale web-based business, getting advice about SEO is probably going to be worth the money. However, for smaller companies, there are plenty of simple things that you can do yourself to help your website rise up the search result ranks, without major expenditure.
The first step is to conduct a thorough audit of your current web presence and how effective it is, benchmarking it to find out how well it’s currently performing. If you search for your business, is your web site in the first five links on search engines? If not, you have a lot of work to do. If you are not already using one, now is the time to install a traffic analysis package, which allows you to find the paths your users are taking to get to your site, and what they’re doing once they get there.
Google Analytics is a package which integrates with Google’s AdSense advertising system and is completely free. Analytics gives you a lot of information about how people arrive at your site, including keywords they’re using to find it through search engines. These are important as they give you a window into the behaviour of actual customers; people who are actively seeking information about your company, its products and services, and the industry you operate in.
The next step is to ensure that your site is being properly indexed by your target search engines. To check this using Google, for example, go to the search engine and type “site:yourdomainhere.com” (replacing the “yourdomainhere.com” with your site address). If your site has hundreds of pages, but only a few are being returned by the search engines as results, then you need to re-evaluate the structure of your site as it’s clear that the automated “spiders” which create search results aren’t finding all your pages.
If you’re finding that few pages from your site are there, you may need to submit your site. For Google, this means going to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and putting in the URL of your site; it will then be indexed by the search engine. You don’t need to put in all the pages; just the main page should do the trick.
Check your navigation
If this is happening with your site, then it’s time to look again at its navigation. The reason search engines are failing to find all your pages is because they can’t follow the path through to the content from the front page; so make it easy for them by putting clear, HTML-only links to as much of your content as possible from the front page. Avoid using drop-down menus that rely on technologies like JavaScript or Flash, as these are difficult, if not impossible, for search engines to follow.
If you have a large site with complex navigation, you may benefit from submitting a site map to the main search engines. A site map is a text file that effectively gives the search engine spider a “map” for your content, letting it find pages more easily which may otherwise be hidden. Many hosting packages include site map generation. If in doubt, ask your host, and once generated you can submit using pages like the Google Webmaster Tools.
Choosing good keywords
Once your navigation is clear, the next thing to consider is keywords. Whenever someone types a search into a search engine, it compares what the user has typed with a list of keywords and returns pages that match. This means that the key consideration for getting yourself higher in the set of returned search results is to ensure that there’s a strong match between sets of keywords and what’s visible to a search engine on your site.
There are some quick and simple ways in which you can optimise your site to work around keywords like this. The first thing to do is find the sets of keywords that most match what your site is all about. Go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type in some simple keywords, which represent what you do. The Overture tool will come back with a list of phrases that people have used to do actual searches that include those keywords.
Next, ensure that the phrases that the tool returns are used in the first few paragraphs of the text on your site. For example, suppose that you’re a company that makes Widgets. Use Overture’s suggestion tool to find a list of phrases which people have actually searched for that include the word “widget”. The first result returned, “widget yahoo”, isn’t really to do with your sort of widget, so ignore that. However, the second, “engine widget” is, so we can use that. Ensure that the introductory copy on your site uses “engine widget” a few times. Don’t try and simply repeat it in a way that doesn’t make sense though, but use it if it’s appropriate.
Rewriting the copy in this way, coupled with ensuring that your pages are easily spiderable, can make a great deal of difference to how well search engines pick up the information on your site. However, it’s not the only way to market your website more effectively, and in future issues of Fusion we’ll be looking at others, including pay-per-click and affiliate marketing.