The_Tao_Of_SEO

The Tao Of SEO It is all pretty zen really. Forget your profound metaphors of trees falling in the forest and the sound of single hands clapping. If you are on the web and can’t be found then are you really there at all? Sure your website may well be the design statement of your generation. The flash interface worthy of a Pixar showreel. Your mission statement inspirational and your prices unsurpassed. But, and it is a big but, who the hell is going to know if you are hidden away in some dark corner of the dubya dubya dubya? Your mum was right. If you’re not prepared to blow your own trumpet then no one else will. Hide your site and unless you have very deep pockets to plug your URL to the world it will never deliver any meaningful return on investment. Unfortunately many bean counters take this as a failure of the medium rather than of its application. Better to piss money up against familiar walls than think through the issues. Web marketing is still just basic marketing. It is important to understand that the four P’s (Place, Promotion, Price, and Product.) still apply they just have different elements and emphasis online. The Place of importance is not a post code but rather a placing on the search results screen of a Google or Yahoo. For many it is indeed page one or oblivion. It is important to remember that these things rarely happen by accident. Most discussion regarding search engine marketing tends to traditionally revolve around Promotion. Getting your site noticed by search engines is often difficult enough but getting higher rankings than your competitor without paying through the nose is often the true art. Most search engines now incorporate some form of paid listing using a pay per click model of some sort or other. Examples of these include Overture and Google Adwords. Increasingly web site owners are being encouraged to migrate to paid listings as the continual revision and refinement of the algorithms used to compile the free listings often arbitrarily cause dramatic fluctuations in the search results. A phenomena referred to in our office as the Google Dance. Once upon a time search engine optimisation meant little more than sprinkling keywords through a pages meta tags and manually submitting your site to the various directories on offer. These days you are lucky if a search engine even looks at them. The Google revolution sparked the explosion in so-called relevance driven search technology. This movement fed on the frustration of users poisoned by the often dubious methods used by some website operators to gain high listings through misleading meta information and sneaky redirections. The result was a raising of the bar in search services as the listings became more useful and the world was Googlised. Recently, however, the increasing contamination of the search results with paid listings has tended to dilute the perceived integrity of the service. Indeed this has lead to Microsoft and Ask Jeeves making noises about abandoning paid listings altogether (http://www.wired.com July 5th 2004). Given the imminent public float of Google it will be interesting to observe their response to this tactic. Paid listings can be an effective complimentary tool in helping to boost your referral rates from search engines however they can never replace a high free listing result. Web users recognise them for what they are - paid advertisements. Like banner ads and advertorials they have their place in the web marketing mix however limiting your search engine strategy to paid listings is short sighted. To maximise your effectiveness in search engines you need to look at how your web site is set up as a whole. On the web the Price element is often more meaningfully expressed in the inverse. That is the cost savings involved in time, money and effort to research are often of greater importance to a prospective buyer than the sticker price of the product itself. Let’s face it the vast majority of bricks and mortar companies are not going to be turned on their head by e-commerce. For every Virgin Blue there are a hundred widget manufacturers. It is not just about getting seen. It is about being found by the right people. Delivering motivated window shoppers to be exposed to your sales pitch and convinced to pick up the phone, walk in the door or send in an email enquiry. Search engines are the key. What key terms are your potential customers searching for and how well does your site attract them? It is important to remember that for most companies the product of their web site is not the inventory in their warehouses. It is the information about that inventory and the provision of a convenient means of accessing it. Amazon is an online giant not because its books are bound better than anyone else’s or the stories contained within are better than the same title from the discount bookseller down the road. It is successful because it delivers it’s information product so well. If you doubt the importance of search engines in this process try typing a book title into Google and viewing the results. Smart marketers refine and update their optimization strategies for new products, brands and opportunities. Ultimately it will be your sites content that determines its long term success however without effective search engine optimization to begin with they may never find it in the first place. Good search engine optimisation requires more effort than simply implementing a working website. It is about doing the little fiddly, time consuming and tedious things above and beyond that which is required to produce an operational web site. This is why so many websites perform badly in search engines. Unless you are informed and motivated you just don’t bother. Sometimes this could mean abandoning (or at least winding back) the multimedia extravaganza that your art director had planned, but experienced web marketers know that good design is about more than just gimmicks and search engine optimisation can still deliver striking sites. It is just that the optimised site is constructed to be appealing to the robotic eyes of the search engine indexing spider as it trawls through the site as well. There is a cost to search engine optimization in this way, however there is also a cost to not doing it. The importance of search engines in the mindset of consumers is more than just a trend. Microsoft and Sensis are spending millions to get into the act as they can see it is the future. Whether your business is prepared for it will depend upon how attractive it is under the search terms that describe your core business. Try this experiment. Think up the core term (or terms) that describe your business best and plug it into Google (pages from Australia) together with your city (eg. Web Design Melbourne) and view the results. Who is there? If you are not ask your self why and how many people are you missing? People don’t just stumble on web sites. They search for them. Poor old forgetful Jan’s boss should have remembered this. Long after the latest printed directory of either colour is consigned to propping up the wonky leg of the work bench in the garage, your website investment can continue to work for you. Provided that is that you take the time and effort to look after it. This means fresh relevant content and search engine optimisation strategies consistently applied. About the author: Tim Giles is a Pre Marketing Consultant for Enedia (www.enedia.com). Enedia's client's include Ansearch (www.ansearch.com.au), an Australian search engine and directory.