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Home::Link Popularity
Why is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) important?
Author : Samer Shami
Did you get tired one day from everybody's continual insistence
that the Internet would revolutionise the way companies do
business? Therefore, to ‘get with the times' you hired a
company to produce a tasteful, professional and up-to-date
website. You integrated it with your backend accounting and
financial systems so people could order products directly from
the website. You then sat back and waited for the cash to roll
in, right?
Now raise your hand if it didn't turn out to
be that simple.
In the mad rush to get something (and
anything) onto the Internet, companies made the leap unprepared.
Many businesses forgot to ask one simply question: How will
customers actually find our website?
Since you literally
share the Internet with another million websites, it is an
important question. Being a perceptive marketing person, you
realise there are four ways Internet users typically locate your
site: - Learning it from traditional media such as TV,
print, radio, brochures, business cards etc. - Link from
another website - Recommended by someone
- Found
using a Search Engine (SE) such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc.
You only have major control over the first method -
throw enough money into advertising and everyone will know about
the site. You can even buy links from other websites such as the
Yellow Pages. For companies that don't have the marketing budget
of a large multi-national corporation, the fourth method is the
only real manner of attracting new visitors.
To make SEs
a viable method, your website must appear in the top ten search
results. Why? Nine out of ten Internet surfers do not go past
the first 30 search results. Many do not even proceed further
than the top 10 results.
How do you get your website into
the top 10? An industry has arisen with the means and knowledge
to answer this question. The process they employ is generalised
as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
SEO is a methodology
(some would argue art) employed to improve a website's rank in
SE results given targeted ‘keywords'. Keywords are the
phrase(s) your target market uses to limit search results to
locate your product or services. For example, you want your
website to have a high rank when someone searches for
‘ipod accessories'; but you don't really care if it rates
highly for ‘tropical fish' - that is not your target.
/> The key to this industry lies in the fact that SEs are
actually very limited software programs. They don't have the
intelligence to understand everything they see on the Internet.
They use ever-evolving rules to score and rate a website's
ability to answer a particular question. Armed with this
knowledge, we can break the SEO process into three general
categories: - HTML code optimisation:
The first stage is the checking, and re-writing if necessary, of
navigation and content structures on your website. SEs do not
understand objects such as images, Flash, JavaScript etc. They
will simply ignore them. There is no point proceeding any
further if the SE cannot understand what it is seeing.
Programmers undertake this category of SEO. A deep understanding
of current web coding standards and techniques is necessary.
Software packages often produce very poor results, and it
usually takes a lot of human intervention to ensure optimum
accessibility. - Content tailoring: A SE
rates web pages according to their relevancy given a set of
keywords. You must therefore tailor your content with these
keywords in mind at all times. Fundamental to determining which
keywords are relevant is an understanding of your target market.
You must know the typical questions they ask to find answers.
There are websites such as WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com)
that can help you to determine commonly used keywords.
Remember: this is not a race to see how many keywords can fill
the page. There is an optimum keyword density. Too dense and it
is considered stuffing or spamming - you will be penalised. Too
little, and you are not considered an authoritative source.
Choosing to hone in on a specific set of keywords per page is
also prudent. You are not trying to optimise for everybody on
the Internet - only those who ask a specific question.
- Cutting-edge optimisation: SEs use
algorithms that are proprietary secrets and continually evolve
over time. Categories 1 and 2 focus on making your website
accessible to SEs and ensuring you have high quality content.
These are well-established principles guaranteed to improve your
rankings - regardless of how the SE algorithms advance.
To give their clients an advantage, SEO practitioners can
sometimes try to abuse the SE algorithms. They may take
advantage of loopholes or shady methods. A simple example is
‘stuffing' a page with invisible text - white text on a
white background. This is invisible to humans, but SEs used to
index this content. If taken one-step further by stuffing the
page with unrelated (but popular) keywords, it becomes
‘spamming'. SEs are smarter today and will notice these
devious tricks. Websites using them will be heavily penalised.
Category 3 is a moving target - and hence carries risk if
poorly executed. What works today is innovative, but may be
heavily penalised in the future once people abuse it to skew
results. You should always be wary of introducing any
initiatives that fall into this category.
So
if you decide to give your site the SEO treatment, how long
before you see the results?
Google re-indexes websites
everyday of the year. The process it follows ensures every entry
in its database is re-indexed every 4-6 weeks. Google will
re-index ‘news' sites much quicker - almost daily - to
stay current. Other SEs use roughly similar periods between
re-indexes. Therefore it can take up to 4-6 weeks for changes in
the ranking to be observed.
Will the three categories in
SEO improve your ranking? Yes. Will they keep you there? No. The
SE algorithms evolve over time. SEO is a form of marketing and
is therefore an on going process of monitoring, obtaining
feedback and tweaking. Most companies do not release a ton of
advertising material with getting feedback as to how they can
improve it in the future.
Please remember that SEO is not
the ultimate and final word on creating a profitable web
presence. It is only one aspect of your Internet marketing
strategy. A good SEO practitioner understands this. They realise
that there is more to the Internet than just search engines.
Obtaining links from reputable websites, advertising using
traditional media and ensuring your customers recommend you to
their friends is just as important. If they don't reflect this
in their overall strategy, consider someone else who does.
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For more information on this topic, please visit our
SEO
information page, where can you download an extended version
of this article, including a Search Engine Optimisation
Whitepaper.
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