The importance of search engines to your exposure or your profitability is becoming more apparent as the internet matures. Most entities now have a website and it is relatively easy for them to attract their existing customers/clients to the site. The key task is for those companies that do not have an existing client base or those that wish to expand their exposure or client base.
The most popular search engine is Google although it is also important to consider engines such as Yahoo and MSN. The plethora of other search engines is relatively unimportant.
The next question you have to ask is where does my brand, products or service come when users search on Google and Yahoo. The important thing is to search not on obscure brand names or descriptions, but to search on the generic description of the product. Users may search on a combination of generic description and brand or they may search for a service in a particular locality. There are tools that you can use to look up the most popular terms that people search on.
Once you have established how well or poorly you are doing under the generic terms that people search on as well as the more specific terms that you wish to appear under the next step is to go about fixing the problem.
Each engine works differently but the most important one Google works by sending out 'robots' that move (spider) around the web examining titles, pages, headers, links and the content of sites. The robot indexes what it can read. Many database driven sites make the error of not dealing with this issue as the products and their descriptions are buried within the website. This is a software fix that can be undertaken by any competent software developer although X-RM believes that we have above average expertise. It is a vital change to make. (See the chart below for the effect that making this change had in an actual example).
Many of the other elements that effect the search engine optimisation of your site as far as Google is concerned relate to your site description, your keywords (how relevant are they), your commands on the site such as 'follow all the links' and finally your basic text content. Relevance is the vital element in this process and Google will do a comparison of the content of your site to the keywords so it is important to have relevant content and matching keywords.
Once you have got your site right and this will also include maximising the links to your site from other sites you have done about as much as you can without an active budget. Yahoo Google and MSN enable you to pay for position via various options that they offer. You can see most of these options by looking on the home page of the search engine and following the relevant links. There are also external providers of this service such as espotting and Overture. Essentially most engines enable you to pay to get exposure against word combinations and you bid against others who are interested in the same word combinations for the position that you get in the search engine. The charges are levied for each 'click through' to your site and is based on what you are bidding.
The concept is great but if you are in an active business area the reality of managing the bids at any time become a time consuming process if you are to do it properly. First you need to begin to track where you are getting your traffic from using a product such as Webtrends or Onestat and you then need to play around with what you are paying using the pay for placement and see how this effects both traffic and also orders. There may well be a difference between the two. X-RM provides a service that can take over the management of the complete 'pay for placement' for you and provide you with a succinct monthly report.
So in summary search engine optimisation is now a vital part of the marketing mix. Increasingly people search for product and information on the web. You need to work on the core structure of your site to achieve as much as you can at no cost (other than the one time cost to effect this) and you then need to establish a budget and implement a process to buy search engine position if the work that you have done on the core structure and content has not got you the position that you want against the terms that you have established will be searched on. Finally once you have people at your site make sure that it is graphically attractive and if you are selling merchandise that it is functional so that all this time and effort has not been wasted by a convoluted or annoying purchasing process.
For more information contact X-RM on 01962 877237
