Search marketing is now widely recognised as a highly effective way of reaching customers online. Last year, over £2 billion was spent globally in online marketing and the figures are set to soar. More companies with an online presence are turning to search marketing to reach prospective customers, generate traffic to their site and convert them into sales.
So, how does it all work? If you’re considering investing a percentage of your hard-earned marketing budget on search marketing you should have a basic understanding of where it’s going and how it works. Most search marketing companies talk about improved website and page ranking but what exactly does that mean? What you want is to increase traffic to your site, improve sales and raise the brand. How does that happen?
Ranking
We always think of ‘ranking’ on crawling search engines as just one of four steps in generating traffic and conversions in the process of successful search engine optimisation. Your site, like every other site, needs not only to be ranked by search engines but found, read, indexed and then ranked by crawling search engines.
Don’t be afraid of crawling search engines, spiders and robots. Notice I talk about crawling search engines. What on earth are these? Actually you’ll have heard of most of them, there really aren’t that many and certainly the only ones you need to worry about, as far as traffic is concerned, are Google, Yahoo, MSN, (Ask Jeeves) Teoma and Mirago. Each search engine generally has a portal component, which is the bit consumers visit to conduct their searches and a crawling component called the robot or spider. So each of the search engines I mentioned above has its own robot, each uniquely named Googlebot, Slurp, MSNbot, Teoma and Henry respectively.
Lost and found
So how does your site get found? Well, robots work by following links. So getting a link from an established site to your site is vital. You can also see if search engines know about your site already by using the command site: www.yoursite.co.uk in the search box at Google for example. This asks the search engine to retrieve all the pages it has in its database (or index) from your domain. This allows you to see which pages the search engines know about. If you are not listed you need to establish links – ask friends, colleagues and business associates and submit your site at DMOZ and the Yahoo directories (note this is different to the Yahoo search engine). You can also submit your site for crawling at most search engines, but be aware. submitting for crawling is not as good and being found for crawling.
What about being read and indexed? Well, again the command site: www.mysite.co.uk on Google and on other search engines can really serve you well. Have a look at what text the search engines are indexing and then see if the links work. This can tell you a lot about how well read and understood your site is.
One of the most important things you can do to improve your search engine readability is to use a unique, descriptive HTML title on every page of your website. Also use a description and abstract meta tag (information inserted into the ‘head’ area of your web pages) and remember that title and meta tags have two purposes. The first purpose is to compel users to click through from a search page to your website.
Such titles and meta tags are often displayed to users using search engines and so using promotional text such as ‘Free Delivery’ or ‘real unique selling points’ entice users to click through. The second purpose is ranking – so use keywords in the title and meta tags that have potential to generate the right kind of traffic to your site but match the content of each page.
Key to ranking
So, what’s the key to good ranking? It’s simply a great site with great content and an enviable back-linking structure that has been established organically because other site owners have felt it important and useful to link to your site. Search engines really look for sites that are part of a thematic community and sites that rank the best are those that demonstrate authority over their subject matter with important, fresh content, referenced by other websites active in the same community.
Matt Trimmer is managing director of ivantage.co.uk
