Improving Web Search Rankings

By Jan Hepola

You’ve put hours of effort into creating your Web site, gathering images that highlight your property, detailing rates and reservation policies, and describing the ultimate family vacation. So now what? Search engine marketing (SEM) should be the next consideration for most small businesses. Understanding how search engines and directories work can provide an advantage to a company that is competing for new site visitors.

Search engines rely on “crawlers” to read specific HTML tags and content within a Web site. A “secret” combination of key elements is used when determining the order of results provided to a “searcher.” The following key elements are part of “organic” search engine optimization:

Page titles – Each page should include a descriptive page title. Page titles should identify the primary content of that specific page, as well as the company or product name. When a site visitor saves the page to their “favorites” list or prints it out for future reference, the title is included. Engines compare the content of the title tags with the remaining elements.
Complete metatag descriptions – Metatags have less importance in the search rankings than a few years ago. They are, however, still valuable and worth spending time on. Each page or primary section of a site should have a unique description tag. Some find it helpful to first identify 10-15 three-word phrases that searchers would use when looking for the topics on an individual page. This list can be included in your metatag keywords. Trim this list down to the top 3 or 4 phrases and begin to put them into sentence format. This is your metatag description tag. These phrases should also be included in page titles whenever relevant. (Use tools such as WordTracker or Overture’s Inventory list to determine the number of queries search terms are likely to receive in an average month.)
Focused page content – Page content is the most important element in organic SEO. Each page should include text focused on customer’s questions, needs, or wishes. The phrases identified as keywords should be included throughout this text. Search engines compare terms for relevancy, occurrences, location, context, and relationship to other terms and ideas. Having text on all primary pages (key navigation sections) is very important. Engines cannot interpret company logos, images and photographs; “Alt” tags should always be included. Visitors using text-based browsers will also find these helpful. These tags do not, however, take the place of actual page content. Don’t forget to include the name of your company in the page text.
Clean code - Search engines prefer simple, straightforward HTML code. While progress is being made, crawlers still don’t do well with Flash, search boxes, framed pages, session IDs (used with some dynamic page generation), and splash intro pages that rely on a visitor clicking to enter the site. HTML hyperlinks allow the crawlers to move from one page to another, and thus should be present on every page. Site maps are a convenient way to guide the crawlers (and visitors) to read and index all the important pages.
Incoming links – The quantity and quality of links coming into the site from other sites has become more important over the past year. Developing links with non-competitive sites that have strong content and their own high incoming link count is a necessary and ongoing task. Completing a back-link check on lead competitor sites may provide helpful information on industry directories and portals. To check incoming links at Google, type “link:www.yoursite.com” into the search box.

Search directories depend on human editors, rather than crawlers, to review site content. Editors place the greatest emphasis on relevant, clear page content. The key elements mentioned above, will serve you well with directories too. Efforts to register the site with search directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo! continue to be worthwhile, although this landscape is changing with the consolidation of engines and crawlers.

The good news: the fundamentals of free “organic” search engine optimization haven’t changed. The bad news: the importance of pay-for-performance search engine marketing continues to grow. I recommend that you focus on the free stuff first, then consider testing the waters of pay-for-performance methods such as paid inclusion (Inktomi, Yahoo!) and pay-per-click (Overture, Google AdWords).

Good SEO resources:

Ms. Jan Hepola is an E-Business Development Consultant with Minnesota Technology Inc.