In search of a higher ranking
interactive news
Everyone desires to have their business or organization rise to the top of a Google search. With marketing efforts focused increasingly on the World Wide Web, this can become crucial to the success of your enterprise. As a result, we've seen a new industry devoted to SEO, or "search engine optimization." SEO effectively means marketing yourself not just to your customers, but to the search engines as well. In a sense, SEO is the new "Y2K" in terms of its urgency and ubiquity for any company reliant upon the use their websites to drive business through their doors.
In reality, when people say "search engine," they mean Google. With an overwhelming 75% of all search engine traffic, Google controls more search than any of its competitors combined. Making Google happy becomes the primary concern of any webmaster looking to raise his site's position in the search results.
Like you, we also see the ads and offers for SEO services. For the computer-challenged, SEO firms can sound downright alarmist in tone, but here's the truth: SEO is actually a fairly simple and straight forward process that actually involves a lot of common sense more than any complex theory.
One disclaimer: No one outside of Google knows how their search engine works. Everyone's understanding of SEO comes from trial and error, and our research is no different. For the past three months, we've closely monitored the results of our own tinkering with a select group of key terms for our site, and the results have mostly confirmed what we already knew.
If you'd like to optimize your site for Google, Yahoo, Bing or whichever search engine, the basics are these:
- Design and build a clean, standards-compliant site that conveys all or most of your main message in the form of text. Search engine spiders cannot read images. Cleanly constructed sites also render faster.
- Identify the words and terms that you believe your potential customers will use to find you and put those in the body of your copy as close to the top of the page as possible. Keep those terms short and sweet unless there is a phrase that is specifically identified with your company. Wal-Mart's new tagline is "Save money. Live better." Type that phrase in any search engine and see what happens.
If your market knows you as the deli that "serves Ohio's biggest corned beef sandwiches" then that term should show up in the first sentence of your opening copy and/or in the page title seen at the top of your browser window. Don't start off with something overly clever like, "Tired of eating small sandwiches?" - Change the front page content of your site with some regularity. Blogs and news feeds have become all the rage partly because they do work toward this end. A blog also gives you an opportunity to establish an online dialogue with your customers and show them why you're such an authority in your field.
- Use only relevant terms in your meta tags, and don't use too many. Google does not rely on meta tags as much as it once did. Putting lots of irrelevant terms in this field will make Google very unhappy, and they will punish you with a lower ranking.
- Submit your site to the search engines. If you have a Joomla site, we've identified some extensions that can simplify this process enormously.
- Build "inbound links." Few things raise your ranking better than a good news story that appears on the web with a direct link to your site. Google loves inbound links, because it gives them a third-party confirmation of your site's relevance, and relevancy reigns supreme in this arena.
Finally, it's important to remember that SEO is a process. It may take up to six months for you to see positive results from the beginning of your optimization efforts. And no, you cannot buy a better ranking through ad buys. Just keep in mind that no matter how much you spend on that advertising, it will not affect the "organic" rankings.
We like this optimization process because it compels you to pay closer attention to your site and update it frequently. An active website reflects an active, thriving organization — something that your market and potential market will always appreciate.