Posted on: Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Hanging out your shingle on the Web

By Erika D. Smith
Knight Ridder News Service

Is your company's Web site the proverbial tree? You know, falling in the woods when nobody's there to hear it?

It is if it's not designed to attract attention from search engines. And you can forget about yelling "timber" when your online sales fall as a result.

"A lot of small or local businesses tend to look at search engines like the Yellow Pages. That's not accurate," said Chris Sherman, editor of the industry newsletter SearchDay. "The Yellow Pages are local. If people are looking for you, they'll find you. Search engines are looking at billions of pages on the Web."

If Google or Yahoo can't see your company's Web site, most customers can't either. And that means you won't see much profit from it — no matter how many fancy, flashy features you add.

Fifty-five percent of all online purchases begin with a search engine, but 93 percent of customers don't look past the first two pages of the results, according to the Internet research firm Jupiter Media Matrix.

So the key to e-commerce is not only to design a Web site for search engines to notice, but to optimize it so it ranks highly.

There are several ways to do both. Some, of course, are easier than others.

In the end, though, search engine optimization remains a bit of a black art. That's because Google, Yahoo, MSN and other "crawler-based" search engines rank Web pages once a month based on secret mathematical algorithms.

Cracking those algorithms to be No. 1 is impossible. But there are certain constants that will raise your Web site's ranking.

The simplest suggestion is to add links to similar Web sites or get other sites to link to you.

"The more links you have pointing to your pages, the higher the ranking," Sherman said.

If your company sells toys, ideally, you should get Toys "R" Us to post a link to your Web site. It's kind of a cool-by-association rule. The better company you keep, the more important you seem.

The design and content of a Web site also can affect its ranking.

The writing should be clear and concise, using words that describe your company and what it does. And remember, keywords are your friends. For instance, a company called Toy Shop should have a link that reads "Contact Toy Shop" not "Contact Us."

"You have to build a Web site for humans, and you have to build it for search engines as well," said Garry Grant of Search Engine Optimization Inc.

Some companies can do these things themselves. Others can't, especially when they hear about using keyword-specific "meta tags" in the source code and avoiding Macromedia Flash-heavy designs.

That's where search engine optimization companies come in. Choosing one should be done with care. Because the industry is booming, there are plenty of ways to get scammed.

There is no quick way into the top 10 of any search engine, despite the hype. It can take weeks or even months.

Try to focus on the outcome, not the techniques and tactics of search engine optimization.

Decide what your goals are. Do you want your Web site listed in Google's top 10 under every keyword in your company's category, or just certain search phrases? "Ask them, 'How are you going to help us achieve our goals?' " Sherman said. It's one way to avoid getting snowed by the technical details.

And anytime you hear an optimization firm use the word guarantee, "turn tail and run," Sherman said. That firm probably is using spamming tricks that can get your Web site booted off a search engine for good.

"You have to do it ethically," Grant said. "You have to do what the search engines want. You can't try to trick them."