Payback time

By David White, Chief Executive of Weboptimiser.

Back in the early days of the Internet, web sites weren�t expected to be profitable. As brochureware, their job was simply to provide information, or act as a hub for communication. But in today�s very different climate and environment, return on web investment has gone from being a luxury to a necessity. Internet businesses are under more pressure than ever before, from owners, investors and shareholders, to take (or at least to promise) a faster and faster path to profitability.

At the same time, people are starting to realise that what works offline doesn�t necessarily work online. Advertising, particularly pop-ups, might boost awareness, but certainly increases irritation. Flash design, likewise, might win awards but often adds little to the user experience.

Enter the search engines

In the meantime, there has been a quiet revolution that anyone using the Internet today takes for granted: search engines. The first port of call for anyone looking for anything on the Internet, and the gateway to the traffic and transactions that are the lifeblood of e-commerce today, the search engines enjoy enormous power.

As a result, search engine friendliness has become an essential element of Internet marketing strategy and, with the rise of the professional search engine optimisation company, a respected industry in its own right.

What can the search engines do for you?

Being search engine-friendly has a wealth of advantages: superb online visibility and brand awareness, higher levels of qualified traffic, user and customer acquisition costs in just pence, rather than the pounds it often costs through other means. Search engine-friendly sites, because they�re formatted in a certain way are often faster to load and visitors are taken straight to the content they�re looking for. Online sales are often higher on these sites and on-site promotions such as banner and button campaigns tend to get a better response. That�s why search engine friendly sites are more often referred to as �optimised�, because they work harder, faster and smarter. In fact, optimised sites have advantages that go way beyond good positions on search engine listings.

How to be search engine friendly

Of course, being search engine-friendly is not just a case, as it once was, of tweaking the meta tags and subscribing to an automated submission system. Ever more aware of their responsibility to help web users find relevant content, each search engine has developed a set of unique and stringent criteria for the submission, registration, assessment and listing of sites. Sites must play by these rules and learn how to harness the power of each search engines� ranking algorithm � or miss out on an unmissable opportunity.

Of course, not everyone plays by these rules. Techniques, such as spamdexing and cloaking, designed to mislead the search engines into giving a site a higher listing than it really deserves are common practice in several online sectors (pornography and gambling are typically two of the worst offenders). But spamdexing and cloaking, while sometimes successful in the short term and often known by other, friendlier sounding names, are a high risk strategy that no blue-chip company which values its brand integrity should try. The search engines have publicly declared their commitment to stamping out these unfair and unethical practices and any site caught doing it will either be blacklisted or banned.

No, the only way to optimise sites for the search engines is to do things their way: to design, format, structure, register, submit and host each site according to each search engine�s individual, ever-changing (and often idiosyncratic) criteria, standards and processes. There are no short cuts.

David White
Chief Executive
Weboptimiser
0207 953 7118
www.weboptimiser.com