Marketing
Search Engine Optimization: You may, if you've been researching web site designers, have heard a lot about this. You may have seen it abbreviated to SEO (we told you computer people love acronyms!) and wondered what the big deal is with SEO. Perhaps you read or heard something convincing that makes you think you won't settle on a web developer until they can promise you top notch SEO.
Truthfully SEO is a fairly controversial topic. Many SEO enterprises that promise search engine placement in exchange for cash are scam artists. The fundamental problem is that search engines are—at times—at odds with site developers, owners and marketers. Search engines want to properly index the Web in a way that their users will be able to find the sites and/or information they're looking for. Site owners want their sites to be associated with certain search terms and want to be at the top of every relevant list, no matter what. Too often these goals are nearly mutually exclusive since what is perhaps best for a search engine user looking for information is not what is best for site owners.
The other element to the problem is that the Web is massive, containing billions of individual pages on hundreds of millions of sites. No team of people can ever hope to properly index the Web so search engines employ complicated mathematical equations, incredibly vast amounts of computing hardware and powerful software to help them automate the process of noting each individual site. These search engines use these automated systems to deliver their product (their results) to their users. But like any automated system, engines can be gamed by the unscrupulous or the truly devoted.
To understand how SEO scam artists spoil the Web to make their money, it helps to understand how search engines work. Google is the number one search engine in the world right now, so they're a good example. Of course, Google's equations and software are trade secrets so we can't know exactly how they index and rank pages and sites, but plenty of people have spent a long time watching Google and observing the way it works to the point that we have a pretty good idea of what makes them tick.
First of all, Google starts a program called a “spider” which travels across the Web, reporting the names, locations and contents of each site it comes in contact with to Google. As it catalogs each site, it makes a note of the other sites linked to by that site and follows those links to index the next site(s) it encounters and so on. Google pays special attention to the words on each page. It tries to determine what each site is about and it makes a note of how many other sites link to the site in question when they're talking about the topic on which the current site focuses. For instance, if there were a site called “battery-operated-cats.com” and two hundred other sites linked to it whenever they were talking about battery operated cats, Google would assume that battery-operated-cats.com was authoritative on the subject of cats that require batteries and searches relating to cats and batteries would likely return battery-operated-cats.com at or near the top of the listings.
One of the things many scam SEO outfits try to do is create a lot of false links to your site on bogus web pages to make Google think that your site is more authoritative than it really is. On the surface this may seem like not such a bad idea since it may sound like a catch-22 that you need to become known before you can become authoritative about something and it can be hard to become known without some sort of help. The problem is that all these bogus sites become entities of their own as SEO firms use them for hundreds of clients and work hard to disguise their true intention from Google. These bogus sites then become authoritative in themselves for some things and begin to clutter search results with pages full of nothing but unconnected links.
Decency
The correct way to get properly ranked, unfortunately, is to save your money for something more appropriate than fly-by-night, promise-you-the-world con artists and in the meantime, roll up your sleeves and do some work.
The first and by far the most effective way to get your site ranked is to make sure you include content. You may have heard the phrase “content is king.” Nowhere is this more relevant than on the Web. You may have the best product in the universe that everyone needs at the lowest price imaginable, but unless you can tell people about it, people won't know where to find it. Pretty pictures and whiz-bang multimedia content can be great elements on sites to help boost your company image and drive home points about your company. But they can't replace plain old written information. Words are what make the Web work, and without words to describe what you do, what you sell, why you're special and what you're currently up to, you're leaving your customers to guess at what makes your business worthy of their money. Preferably you'll include a well-written, detailed description of all the most important elements of your company in the easiest to find location (probably your front—or index—page) and include the key words and phrases in that description that you would like search engines to associate you with.
Site owners sometimes forget that web sites are remarkably simple to update and change; keeping content fresh and new is a good way to keep people coming back to your site. Writing interesting things that make people want to link to you or pass the address to your site on to their friends and come back to see what else you have to say adds to the chance that you'll develop a word-of-mouth buzz and start to see your rankings creep upward.
The second thing you need to do to increase your ranking is to contact other site owners and maintainers with professional but personalized requests to host a link to your site on theirs. Sometimes you can offer to exchange links with them to boost both sites' rankings. The key is that the sites that host your link should be relevant to your site, and link to you appropriately. Lists of arbitrary links on sites look like advertisements. See if you can talk to other site owners about posting features on your site or reviewing your products, writing editorials on your service or telling other friends about your site. The more you market your site as the destination to learn about your company, the more it will be associated, at least in the online community, with you and your product or service. Association leads to familiarity and familiarity leads to authority.
If you must increase the presence of your site quickly, employing people to fudge search engine results (usually at a high monetary cost) isn't the way to go. Search engines hate SEO firms and work constantly to thwart their tactics. Do you want to put your faith and money in techniques that the search engines themselves don't like? A much better way to work with search engines to get your site listed is to fill out an application for listing. Some SEO consultants will submit your site using automated programs that submit over and over again. Search engines hate this, too. Apply once, if the search engine will allow it, and let them process your request normally. If you want to throw some money at the problem of search engine rank, consider buying a sponsored link. Google offers reasonable rates and lets you choose which search phrases to sponsor. Their sponsored links are fairly user-friendly and often extremely relevant which makes people more likely to click on them than other online marketing methods such as banner ads.
Be careful trying to be too picky about what key words or phrases you focus on, though. Most companies that provide Web Servers offer statistics about which phrases users are using to locate and access your site. Go with what the people are using, don't be hung up on what you would prefer. As long as potential customers are getting to you, if they want to do it by searching for “battery cats” rather than “battery operated cats,” it doesn't really matter, right?
So you're starting to get a hang of this Web business. You feel you would like a site and you're determined not to fall into the trap of making bad decisions when it comes to getting onto search engines. So why exactly do you need to hire a professional design firm? Isn't that geeky kid down the street going to be good enough to get you started?