Opt-O-Matic: Let Searchers Find Your Web Site

By Christopher Raymond, interactive director for Schubert Communications, Inc.

As seen in the October 2007 issue of Chester County Business2Business

The Internet is an ever-growing information buffet with thousands of new Web sites added every day for knowledge-hungry customers. With this kind of growth, ensuring your business-to-business (B2B) Web site at the top of the food chain is a key ingredient to sales success.

The secret is investing in techniques that ensure customers find your site instead of your competitors’. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the most cost-effective method for garnering high Web site traffic. SEO simply means altering your Web site so that it results in higher rankings when potential buyers use search engines.

So the questions to ask yourself are: “When a Web user performs a search, where do I rank in the list of results?” and “How do I become No. 1?”

How do you rank?

It’s estimated that more than 350 million English-language Web searches are conducted every day. Web searching is the second most widely used Internet operation after e-mail. So, it’s safe to say that a search engine is the starting point for almost every Web user.

That being said, Web users simply don’t have the time or willingness to wade through 2,000 search results. This is why being ranked within the top 10 search results is so critical for B2B companies. If you aren’t within the top 10 results, 350 million Web users might not know that your company exists.

So now you are asking, “How do I change my Web site so that it ranks well in searches?” This is where an SEO program comes into play.

SEO is the process of improving a Web site’s position in the natural search results such as those produced by Google. No, it’s not voodoo. It’s a real process of researching keywords and competitors’ Web sites, and then analyzing your own Web site. From there, an SEO professional can start making adjustments to help your site rank higher.

Hitting the No. 1 spot

In order to achieve the No. 1 spot, your Web site may experience quite a few changes. Some will be noticeable, others won’t. For instance, you will probably see changes within the main content, as this most influences relevancy results. But the key is to optimize the content without sounding optimized. This means the copy maintains the original message you intended, but exchanges words for ones that will help boost search engine effectiveness.

Also expect changes in your navigation structure. This is very common, especially with Web sites that use a lot of graphical images or Flash files as buttons. Changing these types of graphical elements to text links helps the search engines define the overall structure and content of your Web site.

SEO can also be increased by the addition of new content such as a blog and PDF files that contain product and technical information, articles and press releases. These features will help build your content offering, but also offer a deeper level of content for the search bots to grab onto. These alone can yield the biggest boost to your rankings.

And yes, sometimes major code overhauls may be needed to clean up the HTML. Using CSS (cascading style sheets) keeps the HTML as simple and clean as possible. This will enhance your Web site’s search visibility.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is a program. In order for your Web site to maintain its rankings and keep up with the conception of new keywords, the optimization process must be ongoing.

SEO out of a box?

There are many SEO software packages available that claim to boost your Web site rankings. Sure, they might help identify your current rankings, show keywords being searched to find your Web site, and even offer meta tag recommendations, but this isn’t enough to get the real results you’re looking for, especially if you’re duking it out in a very competitive area of the business world.

Effective SEO requires much more than dropping in some keywords and optimizing meta tags. It’s not a one-size-fits-all deal. The key is a clear understanding of your market and individualized attention to your Web site. This will produce the results you expect. Anything less and you’re wasting your money.

Guaranteeing results

Beware of companies that say they guarantee top rankings. The reality is that you can’t guarantee top rankings within Google, Yahoo! and MSN. These companies are either using optimization tactics that could result in blacklisting from Google, or optimizing for keywords no one searches for — you may get the top ranking if someone actually searched that term.

Yes, blacklisting is as bad as it sounds. Google can remove a Web site from its search database if underhanded tactics are used to increase rankings.

Good search professionals adhere to Google’s best practices of optimization, and they explain each step of their optimization process. Be sure to ask this of your agency SEO professional.

So just imagine that out of 350 million searches a day, you capture a few thousand of those users looking for your product or service. These are leads you probably never would have gotten without an SEO program — leads that could impact your bottom line.



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