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Search Engine Optimisation

What it really takes to get a top-ten listing for your site, and advice on what you can do yourself to improve your site's search engine rankings.

An NMK seminar in November 2002 revealed some of the secrets of search engine optimisation, and examined what it takes to achieve a high search engine ranking for your site.

Speakers

• Charles Meaden, MD, Digital Nation (www.digitalnation.co.uk)
• Eric Renom, General Manager, Netbooster Ltd (www.netbooster.co.uk)
• Carl Spencer, MD, Ultima Thule Technology Ltd (www.ultimathule.net)
• Charles O’Neil, Lateral (chair), (www.lateral.net)

Report

Why optimise your website? Search engine referrals typically account for 40 to 70% of all traffic on commercial websites, so it stands to reason that the higher your site’s search engine rankings the more traffic it will receive. Many users don’t look beyond the first page in a list of search engine results, and very few go beyond page three.

If your site doesn’t show up in the first three pages when you enter appropriate search terms, you’ve probably got some work to do. Fortunately, significant improvements in your rankings can be made relatively cheaply if you’re prepared to put in a bit of effort. Charles Meaden, MD of internet marketing agency Digital Nation, suggests a three-pronged attack:

1. Carry out research.
2. Edit your content.
3. Add the correct HTML tags.

Research

What are the key words and phrases your customers would use to describe the products and services you offer (remember these may not be the same as the terms your company uses internally)? Charles recommends compiling a list, and entering them in search engines to see what comes up. Visit the top 10 sites listed and consider the language and content they use.

A good tip is to download the Google toolbar into your browser and use the page info/similar pages button to generate a shortlist of sites with similar content to your own. Another is to use the Wordtracker site (www.wordtracker.com), which provides lists of commonly used search terms.

Edit Content

If you want to achieve high rankings, it is vital that your site has plenty of good, relevant content on the topics your customers will be searching for. The reason is simple – the more unique content you have on your site, the more pages there are to be indexed by search engine spiders. It’s often possible to increase the volume of relevant content on your site quite easily by adding pages of FAQs, links to other sites, and white papers (although these should be published in HTML, as Google is the only search engine that archives Adobe Acrobat documents).

For one client specialising in programme management, Charles went as far as creating a portal dedicated to the subject with over 100 pages of appropriate content. This approach helped the site to gain a number one slot on Google, MSN, AltaVista, AOL, Lycos, Hotbot and Netscape for the search term ‘programme management’, plus high rankings for alternate spellings and related search terms.

Add the Tags

A common misconception persists that website optimisation depends primarily on the use of meta tags. In fact, this has not been the case for some time, and a number of other tags will have more effect on your listings position. Charles offered the following advice:

• Ensure 'title' tags accurately describe the contents of the pages they refer to throughout the site – not just the home page.
• Include 'description' and 'keyword' tags, which are used by some engines.
• Optimise the tags on every content-rich page on your site – many of your competitors will only optimise their home pages.
• Include descriptive 'Alt' tags for all graphics.
• Only use words in your tags that actually exist on the page.

What Not To Do

As well as avoiding using bogus words in your tags, Charles warned against artificially stuffing your page with keywords, creating identical copies of existing pages, and using invisible or very small text. All are bad practice, and some search engines will penalise your site or drop it altogether if you are caught. And whatever you do, don’t include your competitor’s names in your keywords in an attempt to send some of their customers your way: this is effectively illegal, and you could be sued.

Submitting Your Site

Don’t wait for the search engine’s bots and spiders to find your website automatically. Get things rolling by manually submitting your site to each of the search engines (look for the ‘add your site’ or ‘submit URL’ links). Charles’s tip is to submit every single content-rich page separately, instead of just the homepage. Follow the rules outlined on each site, and start with Google, which provides 43% of all searches on the web. Some engines also charge for ‘express submission services’ to speed up the process, which can be worth considering.

Charles also suggests submitting your site to directories such as the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) and others specific to your industry. The reason for this is that the number of inbound links to your site also affects how it will be ranked. (Google won’t even look at your website if other sites don’t link to it.) It can be useful to find out who links to your competitors’ sites using the Google toolbar, or by visiting www.marketleap.com.

Powerpoint Slides

Charles Meaden has made his powerpoint presentation available to NMK users from his company's website. Download the presentation.

What’s a Good Ranking?

For Eric Renom, General Manager of Netbooster Ltd, the aim of search engine optimisation should be to achieve a top five listing on the first page of results. Research has shown that these key positions have an almost 100% chance of being seen by users, while there’s only an 80% chance that the next five will be seen. Fifty-five percent of users never go beyond the second page of results, so being ranked beyond this point is not desirable.

Eric agrees with Charles on the importance of content, and of researching the phrases that users put into search engines – after all, what would be the point of having a number one listing for a phrase that nobody uses? Netbooster advises clients to target keyword phrases of two or three words, as competition for single keywords is vast, and it’s extremely inefficient to optimise for them.

Technical Factors

Eric also emphasises the importance of technical factors that could prevent search engines from ranking your site highly. Search engines can have difficulty with frames, dynamically generated pages, javascript within web pages, and details in code that create problems for the ‘spiders’ that automatically harvest data about your site.

As Carl Spencer of Ultima Thule explains, Spiders use sophisticated algorithms to record all of the textual content of a website, and apply different criteria for ranking to what they find. Spiders are able to differentiate different types of data (e.g. body text, alt tags) and store them in the search engine’s specialist databases. If there are elements in your site preventing spiders from crawling the content, your rankings will suffer. For this reason, SEO companies often carry out technical audits of their clients’ sites, and test them for spider-unfriendly code with spiders of their own.

Another issue that often arises is that pages generated dynamically from databases and content management systems can be unreadable to search engines – potentially a huge problem if you’re running a large e-commerce site, like several of Eric’s clients. Netbooster’s solution is to use a system that generates a ‘virtual html site’ from the database that is readable to Google and other engines.

It is now also possible for to have commercial relationships with search engines, whereby trusted partners such as Netbooster are allowed to make direct and immediate changes to the data in search engine databases relating to the sites for which they are responsible, via XML feeds. Typically, Google doesn’t offer this service, but Inktomi does, and it powers MSN, Lycos, Tiscali and Teoma. (Google currently powers AOL and Yahoo.)

Cost Per Click

Another source of income for search engines are ‘cost-per-click’ (CPC) advertisements, such as Google’s AdWords, which appear in response to specific search terms. The cost of associating an ad with a particular search term varies according to the popularity of the keywords involved, but the advertiser only pays for the number of click-thrus achieved, and not for the number of times the ad is displayed.

Eric recommends using CPC ads to supplement a long-term positioning campaign, particularly in the initial stages before you’ve obtained your top-ten ranking. The main advantage is that they can be highly cost-effective, particularly if you choose your search terms carefully. As Eric explained, associating your ad with the phrase “car insurance UK” may bring in 10 times less traffic than “car insurance”, but the cost is 20 times cheaper.

How Long Does it Take?

It’s important to realise that you won’t see the results of your labours immediately – search engine optimisation takes time, which is why Eric advocates using CPC in the short term. Charles Meaden’s success with his programme management client took over a year of gradual improvements to achieve.

One reason for this is that search engines do not update their database indexes as often as you might expect. According to Carl Spencer, whose company Ultima Thule (www.ultimathule.net) specialises in bespoke search engine development and robotic data capture, most major search engines will refresh the data they hold on your site every three months on average. Google is the best performer – refreshing news sites every day, major sites every week, and the remainder about once a month – but less successful search engines will take much longer to acknowledge the improvements you make.

Usability

Carl is keen to highlight the crossover between optimising your site for search engines and improving usability and accessibility. Many of the features that make sites more accessible and easy to use, such as relevant page titles and Alt tags for images, also help to improve your search engine rankings.

Carl’s tip is to use Bobby, an online tool for improving the accessibility of websites (http://bobby.watchfire.com), to identify areas of your site that can be improved for search engines too. For example, running a Bobby scan will help you to identify ‘Untitled’ page headings that need to be replaced with more relevant descriptive text. Making these changes alone could significantly improve your rankings, according to Carl.

Speaker Profiles

Eric Renom, General Manager, NetBooster Ltd (www.netbooster.co.uk)
Eric Renom started his career as a successful financial trader, before working in the Information Technology (IT) sector for French companies such as Medexis, Ackia, and E-naissance. He was recruited by NetBooster in June 2001 to manage their UK operations, and has subsequently developed an expertise in Search Engine Marketing. A graduate from the Reims Management School (CESEM), specialising in European management, Eric has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in European Business Administration.

Charles Meaden, MD, Digital Nation (www.digitalnation.co.uk)
Since its birth in 1997, Digital Nation has concentrated on internet marketing and ensuring that all of it's clients, from BT and Gartner to small businesses, achieve the maximum possible return from their sites. To do this, Charles's company has spent a considerable amount of time researching and experimenting with the best ways to drive traffic towards web sites. Recent successes include a number one slot on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Hotbot and Altavista for the phrase "programme management" (for the Program Management Group), and number one slots on Google and Yahoo for the terms "buy to let" and "letting agents" (for the Association of Residential Letting Agents). Digital Nation also provides online market research, e-mail marketing, consultancy and a 'Frank But Fair' web site auditing service, which examines web sites' strengths and weaknesses against 50 different criteria.

Charles O'Neil, Project Manager, Lateral (www.lateral.net) (Chair)
Charles O'Neil is a project manager at Lateral, the award-winning online agency, where he is responsible for all Search Engine Optimisation consulting and implementation for clients. Previously Charles worked as Technical Director for one of London's leading Search Engine Optimisation consultancies.

Carl Spencer, Managing Director, Ultima Thule Technology Ltd (www.ultimathule.net )
Ultima Thule specialises in building bespoke search engines and undertaking Robotic Data Capture (TM) using a variety of search-engine-based systems. The company, based in the North West is currently working with government agencies to research internet use by business, and in particular by SME's (small to medium-sized enterprises). Carl will be presenting his work relating to the adoption of technology by sites as well as their presence within the major search engines, adoption of keywords and the usability of sites. Ultima Thule were runners-up in this year's 'Be Inspired Business Awards 2002' in the 'Best use of Design and Innovation' category for their launch of Searchitopia (TM) - the web's first build-your-own search engine system. Carl has two degrees in engineering and moved into the world of search engines in 1998, following a 10-year career with British Aerospace.

This event was presented in association with:

Business Link for London (www.bl4london.com)

UK Online for Business (www.ukonlineforbusiness.gov.uk)

To have a look at the original event click here.