Taking the right steps
There are some simple steps firms can take to rise up the rankings on Google, by far the most popular of the search engines. "Have good content and good navigation," says Anthony Quigley, chief executive of Online-Marketing.ie.
He says that using a site map - a guide to where information is located on your company's website - can prove most effective in satisfying search engines. "When Google visits a site it's like [it] turns up in a new town looking for directions," says Quigley. "You have to give it that map, constantly giving clues and directions to content."
High-quality content can also help gain attention from other websites. Quigley says website owners who find a particular site useful may add a link to this site to their own, perhaps in a section featuring 'useful resources' or 'external links'. Search engines will recognise that a link to your site has been added to another website, increasing its chances of getting a higher search ranking.
Reciprocal linking with other sites can also gain the attention of the search engines. Posting links to other businesses, who in turn post links back to your site, is an easy way for a website to get noticed. Bear in mind, however, that this tactic is not as effective in the eyes of search engines as independently posted in-bound links. The reason for this is that search engine 'spiders' crawl websites and assess them based on certain criteria, in order to determine a site's ranking in search results. The spiders rate independent sources of links as being of higher value than links posted as a reciprocal agreement between businesses.
Top SEO tips
There are a number of other measures you can take to help improve your search engine ranking. Francis Nesbitt, managing director of search engine marketing firm Croan.ie, outlines some of these steps:
1. Select the right domain name for your business; one that includes a key term can help. For example, www.mcgrathmortgages.ie would be a good web address for a firm of mortgage advisors owned by a person with the name McGrath.
2. Select the right keywords for your business or product. As we saw in Issue 211, keywords are the words or phrases that internet users enter into a search engine when looking for particular information online.
3. Use keywords in page titles, file names and folders on the site, and use keyword text in your navigation anchors, instead of just saying 'click here'.
4. Create useful content for your site and include your key terms in it. In the above example, McGrath Mortgages could help boost their ranking by providing information on mortgage services and making sure to use phrases like "mortgage advice" in the text.
5. Make keywords part of your 'meta' description. This is a piece of HTML code that is unseen by normal visitors but visible to search engine spiders. Use it to provide a brief description of your website.
6. Use heading tags on all your webpages to describe their content, including keywords in these titles. These are essentially coded headings for webpages that grab search engines' attention.
7. Secure high-quality incoming links, from sites ranked highly by search engines. In-bound links help to convince search engines that your website is important.
8. Create a site map of your site and let the search engines know where it is. Tools such as Google Sitemap provide businesses with a relatively easy method of developing a site map.
Buying success
Following the above steps can give you a good start in the search engine optimisation stakes. But on the battlefield, a pincer movement can be devastatingly effective. If you consider an SEO-friendly website with in-bound links as one flank, then pay-per-click advertising represents a second wave of attackers. "There is real value in utilising both paid and organic search," says Richard Hearne, search analyst with SEO firm Red Cardinal.
Nesbitt says that web surfers tend to ignore paid ads on the right hand side of the screen in a search engine, but that paid-for results that appear just above the main results tend to grab the attention of most search engine users. By combining good organic SEO with a pay-per-click strategy that involves choosing the right keywords, firms can potentially gain two or three of the top five results on a search under those terms, according to Nesbitt.
Pay-per-click can also aid firms in situations where it is difficult to succeed with organic SEO. "Pay-per-click can be a very useful channel in multi-territory search campaigns," says Hearne. "In some territories organic rankings may be extremely difficult to achieve, and in those cases pay-per-click offers a great channel for promoting your site." (For more on pay-per-click advertising, see Issue 157.)
The dark side of SEO
Using the right SEO strategy can get a business more notice online, but the wrong tactics can prove disastrous. There is one simple lesson all businesses need to learn about SEO: don't try to trick search engines.
"The search engine companies have spent years developing their search algorithms to try to weed out quality content from spam [and] intentional attempts to fool them," says Nesbitt.
The likes of Google have developed a zero-tolerance policy towards firms that use nefarious tactics such as cloaking. This is where a site owner uses software that watches for when search engine spiders visit a site. These spiders are redirected from the website visited to a separate site that is full of keywords and other factors likely to gain Google's interest and boost the site's search ranking.
It all sounds wonderful until you hear the downside. "Google just bans people that try these tactics. It can take a long time to get allowed back onto Google afterwards," says Quigley. Essentially, efforts to trick search engines result in these engines removing a website from its database. Needless to say being unable to be found on Google is generally bad for any company, and for some firms could be disastrous.
Other tactics likely to incur Google's wrath include using tiny text and hiding words. Having lots of keywords in size 1 point font on your website or written in the same colour as the background is a very low-tech way of trying to fool search engines. These tactics don't work and will only bring trouble.
Some businesses might be unwittingly drawn into using these methods by professionals hired to optimise a website. Quigley says an SME should talk to other clients of SEO providers before engaging their services in order to root out rogue traders.
Rather than trying to take short cuts to the top of search engine rankings, businesses should endeavour to be the best by working hard at optimising websites. "Create a site which is useful for humans, with original content, and the search engines will like it too," says Nesbitt.