By: Laurie Gooding
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help increase your company's visibility by making it easier for clients to find your website via Google and other search engines. SEO involves more than just picking the right key words--it is a targeted process that brings visitors to your site through search results.
"SEO increases the prevalence of web pages in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing by changing the pages themselves, and by making connections between the pages and the rest of the Internet," said Jonathan Hochman, founder of Hochman Consultants, an internet marketing consulting firm.
In order to achieve these results, it is essential to write clearly and concisely, using a "controlled vocabulary" of words customers will naturally use to look for your business. Additionally, the site needs to have an organized navigation structure with target keywords that are used in the menus and are linked within the text wherever possible. Each page should have a unique title and a Meta description tag. Finally, the site needs to have some high-quality, inbound links that convey trust; for example, links from business partners, organizations or news articles would be good examples of beneficial links. Reciprocal links, purchased links, or links from low-value directories are examples of "bad links," as they can trigger a large number of spam links and thereby, cause your website to be banned from Google.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines send out agents (e.g., spiders, robots and crawlers) to surf the Internet and deposit the information they find in the search engine's database. If a website is designed poorly or does not have links to all of its pages, the robot will bypass those pages and report only what it sees. It is important to optimize the pages that you want to rank. By following best practices, optimization can become part of your normal web development process and, ultimately, takes very little additional time.
When & Where To Start
Ideally, an entrepreneur will think through their web strategy and how they can implement SEO during the business planning process. It is important to make sure the domain name you want is available for your business. A "dot com" is much better than any other extension for a U.S.-based business and hyphenated domain names are less desirable. If you have to buy a domain name from somebody else, the cost could easily run into thousands of dollars.
"Too often, the entrepreneur is focused entirely on building their product or service and consequently, they do not spend enough time defining their marketing strategy," said Hochman. "They may choose a catchy name and create collateral too soon, only to find out that the relevant domain names are no longer available, or that they're too expensive to acquire. I have seen quite a few startups fumble this aspect of marketing," he continued.
Web design should be considered and approached using basic marketing principals during the business planning phase. Effective SEO depends on providing clear and valuable content (key marketing messages), simple and consistent page design, clear navigation and an organization that puts information where users expect to find it. The language on your website should be coordinated with all collateral and social media tools (such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger) to increase the amount of pull-through traffic.
A Good "Recipe" for SEO Is: 1) Do keyword research to identify what your target audience is looking for, remembering that most people search using two-to-four word phrases.
2) Make sure keywords can be found in page titles, content and heading text.
3) Go after high-quality editorial links. Good links are not available to everyone; that's what makes them valuable. (Tip: Your LinkedIn profile can provide a solid link to your site.)
4) Evaluate results frequently using tools such as Google Analytics. Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that allows you to check for errors, analyze HTML tags (important for SEO), identify top search queries, and more. Yahoo offers a similar tool, Site Explorer, and Live Search offers its comparable Webmaster Center.
SEO site grader tools, including Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Link Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center, can be used to run a "health check" of your site, scoring elements such as Website traffic, SEO, social bookmarking statistics and other factors. Google Webmaster Tools provide valuable diagnostic information. If things don't 'look right', such as Google reporting prominent keywords that have nothing to do with your business, then you can fix them. Google Webmaster Tools can even alert you if your site is hacked. These regular "check-ups" can give you valuable information about how your website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
Although this article merely skims the surface of SEO, I hope it illustrates that it is worth investing the time to improve your website's effectiveness and to treat it as an important element of marketing. Consider that a 25% increase in traffic can have a much greater impact on a small business's bottom line-maybe even its very survival-than it would on a very large corporation.
If you would like to learn more, visit one of the following sites:
Hochman Consultants
I interviewed Jonathan Hochman, founder of Hochman Consultants, for this article. A Yale University graduate with two degrees in computer science (BS and MS 1990), he has 20 years experience as a business development, marketing and technology consultant. Hochman is the Chairman of SEMNE, an association of professional search marketers in New England. He speaks regularly at various conferences and writes for Search Engine Land, Search Marketing Standard, and Internet Evolution. You can reach him at: 860.777.2011.