Once a website has been completed and published, obtaining a good ranking from an Internet search engine –Google, MSN Search or Yahoo- usually becomes one of the highest priorities. Oddly enough, during the conception, design and programming phases of a website –in other words, during its creation- that same priority does not seem to be present in a developer’s mind, nor is requested by a client when ordering the site. And even though a web developer, with very good intentions, may use the most advanced programming techniques and the most refined graphic designs, and a webmaster may also host the site on the most modern and sophisticated web servers, the website may experience problems at a later time when it fails to appear within the top search engine results. The reason for this is typically tied to the fact that the designer never took into consideration the most basic indexing aspects of a website and also ignored the fundamentals for web usability, accessibility and compatibility throughout the design process.

Interestingly, our consultants often run into this type of situations when clients come to us asking to improve the positioning of their websites. Sometimes, clients may even be struggling with the easiest of all scenarios. In other words, their website is failing to appear on a first page of results when very specific search terms, intimately related to their line of business, are used. In such cases, the website should almost automatically appear on the top results returned by a search engine. A solution to this type of problems may be as simple as teaching a client how to properly include a title on each of their pages, or could involve a more complex and expensive approach, especially if a website has already been published. In extreme cases, we find discontented clients that after having invested significant resources and money implementing a website, they realize that their site has a difficult time competing and obtaining the expected results.

Building “search engine-ready” websites: born to compete

Are athletes born or made? It seems evident that the best athletes are those that have hereditarily received a privileged set of genes and after applying themselves through a rigorous and continuous training program are able to obtain the utmost from their natural physical abilities. Applying this concept to the implementation of websites, it has also become clear that by providing web positioning consulting services from the very beginning, that is, from the moment that the web design is conceived, we have the opportunity to ensure an end-result that is optimal and search engine-ready. By starting from a solid base, the design will not only guarantee a high level of indexability for our website, but it will make possible later on to apply more refined techniques that will improve the positioning for those search terms that can deliver the best returns in each case.

Therefore, if your company is considering implementing a website at this time, and you are convinced that one of your objectives is to achieve good rankings later on, make sure you order a “search engine-ready” implementation. To assist you in this endeavor, we offer the tips below as some guidelines that should be considered before embarking on a project to produce a “search engine-ready” website.

1. Flash: should only be used when absolutely necessary

Those websites developed exclusively with Macromedia Flash technology are at a definite disadvantage compared to the more traditional, HTML-based sites when it comes to web positioning. If animations are not essential for your website, consider using Flash only in certain areas of a page. In most cases, you will find that the end result is pretty much the same as if the entire page had been programmed in Flash. You may also develop specific micro-sites inside your main HTML-based website to capture those aspects that are best expressed using the interactive and animated capabilities of Flash. But always make sure that both the primary website structure and the structure of all individual pages are HTML-based. By following this approach, the search engines will know where and how to index your site. Finally, you should eliminate any animated corporate logos that get displayed before accessing your home page.

2. Frames: perhaps no longer a very good idea

Frames were introduced years ago primarily to expedite the download of web pages and to facilitate the navigation. Today, their disadvantages far outweigh the original benefits. If your web is currently using frames, you will notice that the title is the same in all pages (corresponding to the frameset title), that the URL address is the same for the entire website, not allowing a user to add one of your pages to their list of favorites. Finally, you will notice that occasionally, your website registers visits to internal pages that a user may have seen outside their corresponding frame, possibly without navigation menus or company information. Frames, in general, pose a great challenge to the positioning of individual pages.

3. Beware of PHP programming elegance

A number of PHP-based websites have recently been emerging that unfortunately share most of the same disadvantages that were identified for frameset structures, making the positioning of their pages an impossible task. These websites are kept inside a single URL. Software in the only dynamic page loads the appropriate set of contents by evaluating the variables associated with each link. However, from a browser’s perspective, and unfortunately, from a search engine’s perspective as well, the entire website consists of a single home page. Therefore, all the dynamic content becomes invisible to both the browser and the search engine, seriously handicapping the possibilities to compete with other websites. Regardless of how elegant a programming style is, the marketability and usability of a web design should never be sacrificed.

4. Content Management Systems (CMS) must also generate search engine-ready results

Websites of medium complexity may offer CMS capabilities, thus allowing users with no programming knowledge to add, delete or modify web pages. CMS systems are very efficient and can help decentralize the efforts associated with updating and maintaining a website. However, some of these systems were created without taking into consideration the indexability of the pages that they generated. If you are planning to let users update pages on your website, either through a CMS system, or through dynamic pages, you must ensure that the system you are putting in place requires these users to specify individual page titles, descriptions, and a different set of keywords for each page. In addition, the system should allow pages to include ALT labels for all images (this is the text that appears in lieu of images when the browser does not download them, or when a browser for the blind is used) and TITLE labels for each of the defined links (this is the text that appears inside a small yellow box when the pointer is on a link). That is the minimum set of prerequisites that should be met. Although, it would be ideal if the CMS itself automatically generated the appropriate HTML code: correct use of header labels Hx, W3C validated code, accessibility-compliant code, etc.

5. Internal search engines: do not hide your web content

Websites that specialize in e-commerce, real estate, and others that may offer a fairly large number of products or items usually include a local, internal search engine. Typically, these engines consist of a small form where users can enter the criteria that they are interested in and the system returns all available items that meet those criteria. Even though this form of navigation is extremely efficient from a user’s perspective, it makes all web content that sits behind this local search engine practically invisible to the external search engines. The automated search engine crawlers are unable to fill the small forms and therefore can never reach the resulting content. Due to the fact that many potential clients will enter very concise search terms (“bungalow in Miami”, “golf balls”, “Bose speakers”), it will be necessary to optimize and position each individual page, or product spec sheet, in this case. An effective technique that will let a search engine reach the hidden content consists of including on the home page, links to various product category pages. For example, links such as “New bungalows available for immediate occupancy”, “Discounted golf balls”, or “Speakers on sale” could be included on the home page. All these links use pre-canned search criteria to reach the corresponding content. These product category pages will typically reflect the most commonly used search criteria and therefore will be very important for our website. External search engines will be able to reach these pages and subsequently, via links such as “More Information”, will also be able to reach each individual product page. The goal is to provide paths for search engine crawlers to reach the content of our entire website.

Conclusion

We only selected a few examples, among the huge number of potential scenarios out there, to illustrate how decisions that were made during the conception phase of a web design can seriously impact our ability to properly index the website later on, thus handicapping its ability to compete.

Avoiding the application of sound design principles in the early phases of a web design will always require the investment of additional time and money afterwards since the repairs will have to be done on an ill-prepared and less optimized base. A website’s indexability (a must for being properly indexed by a search engine and therefore have the potential of being highly ranked for predetermined search criteria), usability, accessibility and compatibility are all fundamental aspects that must be taken into account while implementing a web design. This task could be facilitated by bringing together web programmers and specialists in search engine positioning.

It is interesting to note that the best Internet rankings are achieved even before a website is formally published.

Traditional business managers and economic strategists have always had at their disposal a variety of methods for measuring and evaluating the degree of success of business objectives. For example, an increase in productivity, cost reduction initiatives, meeting certain sales goals, or the impact of an advertising campaign are all objectives that can be methodically measured and directly linked to a quantifiable level of success within a specific timeframe. Then, as businesses successfully accomplish their short-term goals, they are able to establish and pursue mid or longer term initiatives.

When those same business managers and strategists that are used to operating in traditional environments, and therefore are very familiar with managing and classifying clients, calculating penetration ratios, measuring profitability and forecasting sales, are now faced with the new paradigm of a virtual business, they seem to forget that most of what they already know and do, including the use of common sense, is equally applicable to an online economy. However, in many cases, it is very difficult to see how a company’s website aligns with its general business strategy and in extreme cases, a website’s only purpose is to provide the company with a presence on the Internet.

This reality is even more paradoxical if one looks at the fact that the Internet, due to its technological foundation and highly interactive nature, provides the ideal ground for quickly testing new ideas, inexpensively measuring their results, and effortlessly obtaining direct customer feedback to guide future changes or improvements. Let’s therefore take a look at some factors that will allow us to measure the performance of a website in terms of its ROI, and also at some strategies that our traditional business managers will have to establish to guarantee that the same level of success that they are accustomed to is also achieved in a virtual online economy.

1. A website must be fully aligned with the corporate strategic objectives

The objectives for a website must closely follow the general strategy for the company, as established by their executive management. Therefore, when the term website is used, it should not be interpreted as a piece of the company’s Information Technology (IT) or computer systems. Instead, the term website should trigger and be identified with concepts such as Marketing, Sales, Human Resources, Customer Service, Product Support, etc. In other words, if IT is the department responsible for your company’s website you should have plenty of reasons to worry.

2. A website must establish tactical objectives

After the general strategic planning has been completed for the website, each department must then establish the objectives for their own area of responsibility as an integral part of the overall plan.

For example, a department responsible for customer support could help alleviate the load of their customer-calling center by adding to their website a section that contains frequently asked questions (FAQs), or by simply implementing an e-mail based help page where customers’ questions could be answered during non-peak periods. As a matter of fact, many people would rather fill out an e-mail form with their question than waiting on hold for 25 minutes listening to the same melody or sales message.

In the above example, the objective is clear: to reduce the workload of our customer-calling center and improve customer satisfaction. We should be able to measure the performance of this objective by tracking the ratio between the number of calls experienced by the call center and the number of customer inquiries registered by the website.

As another example, the department responsible for buying pre-owned properties in a real estate agency would like to concentrate their efforts in purchasing those properties with the highest customer demand. The objective of that department, in this case, would be to optimize and adapt the agency’s property portfolio to include those profiles with higher customer appeal. This objective could be measured by calculating the percentage of successful inquiries experienced by the website’s property locator.

3. Identifying the Key Performance Indicators

Once each department has established their own tactical objectives, a web-based methodology must be implemented to measure the degree of improvement experienced. Although it might be interesting to know the overall web traffic statistics of a website (items such as unique visitors, pages visited, referrers, etc.) it is pretty obvious that special attention must be given to those visits that directly contribute to the success of the established objectives (buying, asking for an estimate, soliciting information, setting up an appointment, etc.)

This concept is very easy to explain by analyzing the behavior of visitors inside an online store. From all the visitors that access the homepage of an online store, only a portion will use the site’s product locator. Out of that group, only a few will add products to their cart, and from those, only a percentage will eventually complete the online payment process. The relationship between the total number of visitors that accessed our site and those that successfully completed a purchase can provide our website’s client conversion ratio. It goes without saying that the higher this ratio the better the performance of the website will be. This ratio is therefore an excellent Key Performance Indicator (KFP) for an online store.

But even if a website is not an online store, other KFPs, just as easily identifiable and measurable, can still be defined to evaluate the site’s objectives. For the customer-calling center objective mentioned above, the percentage of visitors that access the customer help page after having visited the FAQs could be considered a KFP. In other words, the fewer inquiries the help center page registers the better the FAQ page is probably performing and the less work the customer-calling center is therefore receiving. In the case of the real estate agency objective, a good KFP could be defined as the percentage of successful visits registered by the website’s property locator. Other effective KFPs for that website could be defined by measuring the number of visitors that access property specification sheets, or by calculating the percentage of visitors that eventually set up an appointment to tour a property, for instance.

4. Measuring a website’s performance

The identification of Key Performance Indicators allows us to implement two fundamental processes that will improve a website’s performance:

• A “translation” of the website’s traffic statistical data into concepts and values that can be easily recognized by the individuals in charge of a department or area;
• A “transformation” of that data into knowledge that will allow a department head to make decisions and take actions.

Let’s look at each process separately. Web traffic statistics, in general, contain technical information in a highly specialized language, and they measure an endless set of parameters, most of which lack any relevance to a department business lead. That is why, typically, this information is only accessed by IT professionals or webmasters, and even then, only sporadically.

If, on the other hand, we were able to identify only those pieces of information that are needed to calculate and measure the KFPs that have been identified to appraise the performance of a website, we would be “translating” the vast set of traffic statistics into a language that department heads could easily recognize and relate to. For example, someone in charge of a customer service department would not see that http://www.mydomain.com/customer/client_form.aspx has registered 23,547 hits. Instead, the information presented to that individual would convey that the number of users that submitted an inquiry to the customer help page has decreased by 10%.

By only serving to each department the data that is relevant to calculate their own KFPs, the task of decentralizing a website’s huge traffic statistical data and converting that information into a series of executive summaries, customized for the each department head, becomes a much simpler endeavor.

Implementing the translation process described above also guarantees a higher degree of involvement on the part of those responsible for each department. By providing familiar and recognizable data, these individuals will be equipped with the information necessary to “transform” the data received into knowledge that they can use to propose changes or improvements. This process will be most effective if the KFP changes are monitored over short periods of time (e.g., every two to four weeks.) It is in this manner that the executives will be able to observe trends, anticipate changes and notice the effect of recently implemented improvements. By providing this constant feedback, these decision makers will be kept involved and motivated, supporting a continuous improvement process.

5. Improving a website’s performance

Once the Key Performance Indicators have been identified, the gauge for each KFP is thought of being reset to zero. From that moment, each department is free to propose and develop strategies that will improve the performance of their own area. Since each department has a set of KFPs and a methodology to consistently and continuously measure their performance, they have the necessary tools to “test” new strategies and evaluate their positive or negative effects almost immediately. At the same time, this feedback will stimulate new decisions and/or actions for implementing improvements in each area. Finally, the changes measured by the KFPs will be excellent indicators for determining the level of alignment between our website’s objectives and the global strategy of the company.

Conclusion

The performance and ultimate success of a website is for the most part based on the efforts of individual departments working together towards a common set of corporate goals. It will be the improvements made by those individual groups, in order to achieve their own objectives that will drive the overall increase in Internet performance. If we then establish a relationship between the cost associated with each of the proposed improvements and the return expected from them (for example, in terms of a workload reduction, or an increase in the customer conversion ratio) we will be able to not only measure the ROI for our entire corporate website initiative, but also collect the necessary data to justify future Internet investments. After all, the World Wide Web is just one more avenue for conducting business. An avenue, nonetheless, that still requires us to establish objectives, measure their achievement, and act when necessary to provide improvements. We must also be aware that those same principles that we have so heavily relied upon in a traditional economy still apply in this new virtual business world.

In other words, if your company is not part of the elite, or the top 30 results, the probability of being contacted by a client becomes almost non-existent. Thirty spots are all you have. And only ten of them are reserved for the cream of the crop. Is this truly all the space that is available for everyone around the globe? In reality, there are several factors that make those top rankings that you so feverishly compete for less contended than they first appear. The answer lies in the segmentation and accurate identification of your market niche along with an effective positioning of your website for this niche.

For now, you may want to temporarily forget about the Internet and start by asking yourself how many competitors you have in the real world. Or, if you prefer, you may want to list those businesses that are offering a product or service portfolio resembling yours and targeting the same client segment that you are profiting from. It is entirely possible that you may have already gone the extra mile differentiating your product or service offering, finding a market niche that can be addressed in a unique way, or identifying some other competitive advantage of your own. In other words, you may already be competing with a reduced number of firms, probably less than 30, and perhaps even less than 10. If this is what your real world looks like, why should it be any different on the Internet? Even if we accept the fact that there will always be markets or segments that will attract a greater number of competitors, as long as we have accurately segmented our piece of the pie, we will frequently find that only a handful of competitors are vying for our same portion.

Let’s look at this issue now from an Internet perspective. Can we all fit in Google’s top 10 results? The answer is a definite yes, at least as it applies to those results generated by search terms that potential clients use when looking for companies like yours. The good news is that Google has reserved for your business a small number of pages where your website can appear on the top three results, and then, a handful more where your site will definitely rank among the elite, but where, unfortunately, you will also contend alongside your closest competitors. Therefore, constantly measuring and tracking the amount of traffic that a site experiences does not seem as important -after all, in a real shop, one is more interested in helping customers than visitors. Instead, you should concentrate in assuring that when potential Internet clients look for your products or services they can indeed find your website. Let’s see how this is done.

1. Accurately identifying your market niche

You must get to know the type of clients that you are addressing: who they are, where they are located, and how they look for your products or services. Keep in mind that the typical Internet user begins a search using very broad terms. For example, someone in Great Britain looking for homes in the Costa Blanca of Spain may enter “houses in Spain” as search terms. However, those same keywords could be used by a student who is interested in Spanish architecture, or by a person looking for rental property in Madrid, or by an economist who wants to know how real estate prices have recently faired in Spain.

When a search engine returns an unmanageable number of results, users typically restrict their next search by including more specific criteria. For example, they may limit the geographic coverage -“house in Costa Blanca”-, include the type of product –“townhouse in Costa Blanca”-, or add an action –“opportunities + townhouse in Costa Blanca for sale”. If your business happened to be a small real estate agency in the town of Javea -in the Costa Blanca of Spain-, a potential client of yours would probably belong to the profile of those that entered “opportunities + townhouse in Costa Blanca for sale.”

Nowadays, a great majority of Internet searches are conducted by entering concepts consisting of two or three words. However, after a user becomes more familiar with Internet search engine technology the tendency is to type in more specific and detailed phrases.

2. Identifying your keyword sets

Are you targeting a general English speaking audience or perhaps Scandinavian customers that may be interested in buying luxury homes in Javea? One of your first criteria should therefore be the language.

After a language is selected, you must figure out how potential clients will look for your website. Keep in mind though that if you are a small real estate agency in Javea, focused in selling local properties to a British market, for example, it will be extremely difficult for your website to appear as part of the elite results when someone simply types in “real estate in Spain” as the search criteria. At the same time, be aware that the chances of your small business capturing a customer that entered those terms in Google are much reduced. The problem is that “real estate in Spain” is not the space where your small local company should be competing in. If, on the other hand, you had correctly identified your market niche, you would be enjoying a definite advantage when users entered more specific terms, such as “townhouses in Javea”, “villas in Javea”, “apartments for sale in Javea”, or “real estate agents in Javea”. In summary, the keywords that we select must always identify very clearly our specific market niche.

3. Optimizing your website

Your next step will be to ensure that the contents of your website reflect precisely the products or services that your clients are looking for.

If you are wondering how search engines classify websites, you must bear in mind that after all, a website is nothing more than information. Books have been organizing and presenting information for centuries. If you were handed a book and asked what the book was about, you would probably first look at its title, subtitles or any other text on the book’s cover. Next, you might turn the book over and look for a summary or synopsis on its back. A third level of information could be derived from looking at its index. Finally, and without having to read the entire book, you would browse through some of the pages, where individual chapter and section titles would catch your attention. If you were considering buying the book, you would probably take a look at recommendations from prior readers, paying more attention to those that you consider experts in the field.

Google is no different. When it comes to classifying a website, Google will look at the title of the default page, at its description or subtitle, and at the contents inside the page itself, which if properly built, should be a synopsis of what the users will find in the website. Google will next evaluate the website’s navigation or indexing by traversing through the various links inside each page or chapter. While Google navigates through a website, it will repeat the process of looking at the title, description and contents of each and every page.

In the same manner as we use recommendations from prior consumers before making a purchasing decision, Google will also take into account those links that point to your pages from external websites. And, the more important and prestigious those external referring sites are, the higher your own website will be rated by Google.

It is therefore extremely important to have a good title and description for our website’s home page, but it is equally important to make sure that the titles and descriptions for the remaining pages accurately reflect their contents (nobody wants to read a book whose chapter titles are all the same). It goes without saying -unless your company name is Coca-Cola or Nike- that you should not use the name of your business as a page title. If someone already knew your company by name, they probably would know your web address as well.

4. Learning from your clients

You should review from time to time your website’s traffic statistics and derive from them those search engines and search terms that have primarily been used to find your website. At the same time, this information will identify those keywords most often entered by your potential clients. If you then create new pages using these same concepts and look for partners willing to include in their websites a referral link to your home page, you will start noticing a progressive improvement of your website’s ranking, at least for those searches that deliver the most profitable results.

Conclusion

In your race to become a highly ranked website, do not try to compete using very broad terms. Your site can join a search engine’s elite (top 30 results), or even be part of its cream of the crop (top 10 results), if you identify and segment your market niche accurately. In fact, even though you may end up registering less Internet traffic than before, or less than your competitors, the ratio between the number of visitors that simply pass through your site and the number of potential clients, also known as the customer conversion ratio, will be much higher. After all, what are you most interested in, traffic or clients?

All against one, and one against all

The consolidation of search engines

2005 culminates an on-going search engine consolidation process that has left three indisputable star players: Google as the number one, Yahoo! and MSN Search. These three search engines represent between 85% and 95% of all traffic that arrives at a website directed by a search engine or directory service, and their databases feed results to many other search engines and meta-engines that either revolve around Yahoo!, such as AltaVista, All the Web, Overture and Inktomi, or are fed by Google, like Netscape, AOL, Terra, or Lycos. Meanwhile, the giant Microsoft continues to fine-tune its own technology in the form of a beta version of MSN Search.

These three leaders are expected to fiercely compete in the areas listed below, significantly impacting search engine marketing strategies.

• Quality of Natural Results : only time and the market will tell what search engine will be able to generate the best natural results (i.e. non-sponsored). Google seems to have the most experience in this area, while Yahoo!, based on the knowledge gained from the acquisition of Inktomi, one of the leaders in this domain, has developed its own website indexing algorithm. MSN Search, on the other hand, has been crawling the Web for well over a year to generate its own database for Microsoft.
• Local Search : being able to use a search engine to find the closest pizza restaurant to our current location introduces an important geographic segmentation challenge. For such a strategy to succeed, the global focus of on-line businesses needs to be adapted to satisfy the needs of a more restricted geographical market. Google and Yahoo! have already taken the first steps towards solving this problem and MSN Search will follow suit very soon (as we were finishing this article, Microsoft launched a beta version).
• Free e-mail : Yahoo! Mail and MSN Hotmail used to share the spotlight as being the leaders in offering free e-mail accounts. Google then pulled from its sleeve GMail, a free e-mail account service with 1GB of storage that uses a contextual publicity mechanism based on the automatic analysis of e-mail content, hurting the feelings of those so committed to protecting the privacy of on-line communications. Yahoo! Mail has reacted rapidly raising their free e-mail storage quota to 250 MB and offering a new e-mail variety, Mail Plus, that for less than $20 a year doubles the storage space offered by Google. Once again, Microsoft has fallen behind in this contest even though it has elevated its storage quota to 250MB. It will be interesting to follow MSN’s reaction to Google’s bold move.
• Desktop Search : like many other computer advances, the idea of a web search integrated with a local search of a user’s hard disk is not new. Apple, once again, pioneered this concept and offered a solution in their Sherlock tool, which has been for some time a standard component of MacOS, Apple’s operating system. However, Google Desktop has been the first offering of such an application for Windows desktops and once again, Google has beat the giant from Redmond in its own turf, perhaps anticipating that Microsoft could integrate MSN Search in their next release of the Windows operating system, just like they did a while back with Explorer, critically wounding Netscape Navigator.

New players

Personalized searching, Eurekster , or results shown interrelated by categories, Kartoo, are some examples of risky bets that new players in the search engine arena are developing to defy the leadership imposed to date by the three giants. There is still a lot to experiment with and invent in the Internet and the prior experience of a company that started inside a garage, Google, and that defied and beat –at least for now- the giant Yahoo! is encouraging many start-up ventures to assume the role of David versus Goliath.

Optimize and re-optimize, it pays off

Google’s success has proven that users will utilize those search engines that are capable of generating results that present in their first page of results those websites that are most relevant to the searching criteria provided. With this mission in mind, both webmasters and web positioning experts have tried to position their websites within the highest ranking results for the maximum number of categories, all to attract the largest amount of traffic. The traditional bag of “tricks”, such as keyword saturation, hidden or invisible text, meta-tags saturation, link farms, mirror sites, continuous search engine registrations, etc., is a thing of the past. The algorithms employed by modern search engines have been learning every new “trick” just as quickly as the “experts” have been discovering and taking advantage of all the weaknesses of web crawlers. This constant confrontation has spawned a mutual perfectionism. On one hand, the searching algorithms are now harder to “trick” and they are able to progressively generate more pertinent results ordered in a hierarchy that users find more useful and efficient. On the other hand, webmasters and Internet professionals have discovered that it is more important to correctly identify the market niche being targeted, generate rich and high quality contents, provide frequent updates, use well structured and purified code, make the site highly usable and accessible, rather than utilizing an absurd language simply to “satisfy” Googlebot, for example.

In the area of web optimization, immediate attention should be given to the following points:

• Common sense – How useful is it to appear first on a search if when the users arrive at a page they find a repetitive and absurd language and an ill-formed and difficult to follow structure? Or, to put it in a different way, do we have a website designed to attract a lot of visitors or to attract a lot of clients ? Appearing first on a search engine is similar to having your prospective clients lined outside your door. There is still a long way before those clients walk in, actually choose something and pay for it.
• Professional involvement – The time for optimization “tricks” has passed. Today, the task of optimizing a website belongs to the experts. These are professionals capable of generating coherent navigational structures, suggesting meaningful language for the search engines and natural for the visitors, adding access links from important and reputable external websites, and providing advise beyond the technical aspects to identify the market niches for each website and those keywords that will generate the maximum rate of conversion from visitors to clients.
• Contents – The creation of original and high quality contents provides the highest return on the investment. Writing articles, participating as a moderator in forums or chat rooms, or developing e-books or newsletters will translate into a rapid surge of qualified traffic not only from potential customers, but also from providers, collaborators and possible partners.
• Access links – A very effective way to direct traffic to our website is by including links to it inside other important and related websites. This is due to several reasons.
  • Appearing as a recommended link inside important portals positions us as experts or leaders in our domain, not only in front of an audience of potential customers, but also in front of our competition.
  • Those external links pointing to our website increase our Page Rank, a popularity index that Google uses to express the importance of a website and one of the parameters that it considers when is placing the final search results
  • Links from other websites generate more qualified traffic in a direct way, by users clicking on the link itself, and indirectly, by users who click on Google because they obtained better rankings due to the popularity of our website.
• Usability – Two aspects are important for a website to produce a satisfying performance. Not only it needs to be well optimized for the search engines, or be search engine friendly, but it also needs to be optimized for the visitors, or be user friendly. That is why usability factors are so important when it comes to designing the navigation, framework, and contents of a website.
• Feedback – One cannot afford to ignore the type of keywords and other search criteria that will generate the largest rate of conversion from visitors to clients. By analyzing this data periodically we can continually optimize our website, not necessarily to obtain a greater number of top search engine rankings, but to improve our efficiency and profitability (our real goal).

From information to knowledge

Conversion

This will be one of the buzzwords for 2005. The true goal for this year will be to achieve that a larger number of web visitors actually become clients. Obtaining top rankings in the search engines, even though is one of the most worthwhile investments, still costs money. It is even more expensive to sign up for an AdWords campaign or any other pay-per-click scheme. Besides, the higher the traffic level, the more bandwidth will be required and, in some instances, the cost to analyze the traffic statistics will increase. That is why the quality of the traffic is always going to be valued over the quantity. This paradigm shift will involve efforts in two different areas: positioning and results analysis and measurement.

Positioning

It will be time well spent to identify and select those key concepts for our niche market and the most efficient search engines and value-added portals to direct quality traffic to our website. The majority of the effort will be concentrated in the areas listed below.

• Web optimization will no longer belong to just a few. It is foreseeable that by generalizing the web optimization procedures, competition among websites in the same line of business will shift from the application of certain “tricks” (e.g., meta-tags, keyword saturations, etc.) to improvements in areas such as content enrichment, usability, a genuine interest towards the end-users and the addition of external references by placing access links in related websites.
• Quality code. XHTML 1.0 code and CSS 2.0 style sheets are becoming increasingly popular syntaxes for the development of web pages. They provide flexibility and the possibility to easily customize a web design, while significantly increasing page loading speeds, thus improving the accessibility and indexing of a website.
• Cultural and geographical content adaptation. Global websites go beyond the translation of their text to multiple languages. They also adapt their entire content to match the local peculiarities and cultural and linguistic differences of each country or region. In the United States, for example, websites adapted to capture the attention of the Hispanic community, the number one minority in that country, have already started to surface. In the multi-cultural environment of the European Union, an even larger need exists to adapt website contents to the different languages and cultural interests of each country. And finally, one cannot ignore the emergent interest by western businesses of capturing Chinese, Indian, and Middle-eastern audiences.
• Usability and accessibility. These are two principles that besides improving and facilitating the conversion process from users to clients, they demand a greater social responsibility towards minorities, and generally speaking, an increase in the degree in which a website has to be indexed for a search engine.

Web traffic analysis:

Web positioning and web traffic reports, in isolation, no longer have valuable meaning if they are being used as the only set of metrics to determine the success of a website. Instead, one should focus not only in the selection of the most significant set of performance metrics for a website (the so-called key Performance Indicators), but also in the continuous monitoring of these indicators in order to establish trends and anticipate changes. To ensure success, this type of analysis must follow the following guidelines:

• Each department should establish their own set of metrics and associated key performance indicators. Examples of such indicators could be the rate of satisfactory results generated by an internal product search engine, the rate of cases that were resolved at a help desk, the participation rate among the various website sections as depicted in the web traffic reports, the rate of products that get added to a shopping cart, the rate of visits that concluded in a successful sale, the recommendations sent to other users, how visitors valued the different products, the number of contacts established, etc.
• Once the performance indicators have been identified for each case, a monitoring calendar should be put in place to periodically track the various metrics. Instead of receiving hundreds of web traffic statistics, each department head can then focus in tracking their own performance indicators.
• This form of tracking does allow each responsible party to contemplate improvement plans and determine if previous strategies are having the anticipated success. Since they are only monitoring their own area, corrective measures can be quickly identified and applied.
• Based on the information obtained from these indicators, the entire cycle can be started again.

Conclusion

The search engine consolidation in three primary players –Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search- has simplified, in a way, the task of positioning websites for those engines. Notwithstanding, the generalization of this type of strategies has started to erode the competitive edge that the early websites obtained from using “tricks” to attract the attention of certain search engines. From here on, however, the battle for a successful website placement strays from the application of “tricks” by expert wannabes towards more sound, while more complex, strategies including not only the optimization of meta-tags, but also the enrichment of page contents, code correctness, generation of contents for other websites, participation in forums and chat rooms, active search for partners and access links, on-line training, usability, accessibility, etc. And it is in this new environment, armed with a good set of increasingly sophisticated web traffic analysis tools, that we can make well educated marketing decisions, not only to improve our on-line presence, but to benefit our off-line world as well. As a final comment, I would like to raise the possibility that some or all these tactics may prove ineffective by year end. However, since we have not found that perfect crystal ball yet, it seems wise and prudent to start from the basis suggested in this paper and keep a watchful eye on any new developments that may impact the course that we decide to set.

Now that the majority of website administrators have finally accepted that online marketing applying search engine technology is the most efficient strategy in the long term for capturing qualified Internet traffic, companies that offer web optimization and search engine submission services have started launching aggressive campaigns guaranteeing top positions for their clients by using a limited number of keywords (typically five, ten, or fifteen), regardless of their websites’ business domain. This approach should immediately raise doubts as it is obviously much easier to position a website dedicated, for example, to the dissection of butterflies, that probably enjoys very little competition, than positioning a website dedicated to real estate operating in an extremely crowded market. Therefore, one must always carefully weigh in the promises made by these web-positioning firms since two different scenarios could occur:

• In order to achieve the promised top search results, a web-positioning company may be forced to choose keywords that are so exclusive and specific that even if your website surfaces among the first few spots, the chances of a prospective client typing those exact keywords is extremely remote.
• On the other hand, a client may demand from the web-positioning company the utilization of keywords that are so generic and belong to such a highly competitive business domain that the web-positioning company is unable to realize their promises even after applying all the proper techniques correctly.

This raises the question of whether the mechanisms currently employed for determining the success or failure of a web positioning strategy are adequate, or, perhaps, better alternatives exist. In most cases, web-positioning companies justify their success by providing periodic web positioning reports to their clients. These automatically generated reports show the positions achieved by each of the selected keywords with every search engine targeted. Software programs repeatedly launch queries once a week, or once a month, with each of the search concepts using all the search engines selected, capturing the results and presenting them in weekly or monthly reports. The customers review these reports and apply their information as the only basis for determining the level of success, which brings us back to the original question: Is achieving a good positioning the real objective, or is it using web positioning as just another means for obtaining more qualified traffic the intended goal?

From my perspective, attracting qualified Internet traffic should be the ultimate goal of any online marketing strategy, from web positioning to online advertising, including email strategies, permission marketing, or pay-per-click campaigns. That is why marketing professionals should be using web traffic reports as the true indicators of their online marketing success, as opposed to relying solely on the information provided by web positioning reports. Even though these latter reports can offer a good indication of where a website would appear if certain keywords were used in a search engine, the cornerstone for determining how well a website is actually performing comes from analyzing the real-time statistics provided by web traffic reports. Let’s analyze next some of the reasons that make these reports such an invaluable asset.

• A potential customer can locate a website entering such a large variety of keywords, phrases, synonyms, misspelled words, expressions, etc. that limiting the positioning of a website to the utilization of five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty keywords would not begin to cover the spectrum of possibilities available to any Internet user.
• The origins of prospective clients are typically so diverse that adopting an online marketing strategy that simply positions a website for a limited number of search engines would greatly reduce the chances of capturing additional audiences frequenting areas such as forums, user groups, e-mails, newsletters, referrals, chat rooms, blogs, online articles, etc. Even though, in most cases, Google, for example, generates over 75% of the traffic referrals for a website, it is important to note that external referrals to a website from areas such as forums or newsletters are also taken into consideration by Google and other search engines while positioning a website. A complete web positioning strategy should therefore take into consideration external website referrals due to the effect that they have on the overall positioning and also because these referrals are excellent sources for directing more qualified traffic to a website.
• A web positioning report illustrates the ranking that a website would obtain if the keywords chosen by us were submitted to the list of search engines also selected by us. A web traffic report, on the other hand, shows exactly how a prospective customer found our website (i.e. shows both the keywords typed in by the customer and the search engine used by the customer.)
• A web positioning report shows the spot that could be achieved, but provides little insight on how to improve the results obtained. One of the many features of a web traffic report is the ability to capture what specific keywords and corresponding search engines generated the majority of the visits to a website, or those that actually converted visits into real customers. This continuous feedback provided by the web traffic reports is an excellent mechanism to fine-tune search concepts and improve their effectiveness.
• Web traffic reports can also be utilized to analyze how the popularity of a particular search concept evolves over time and how new trends or concepts are born. This information enables the incorporation of new niche keywords that will improve the positioning of a website not only by reducing the scope of a search, but also by increasing the chances that a potential customer will select those keywords.
• Finally, a web traffic report also lists all the external referring entities (e.g., forums, chat rooms, blogs, etc.); information that will prove invaluable for expanding a web positioning strategy and enhancing its vision for a more global reach.

Attracting qualified Internet traffic to a website (i.e. customers that are interested in the products or services being offered) ought to be the ultimate goal of any online marketing strategy. This effort cannot be simply limited to the selection of a series of search keywords and engines, all chosen beforehand. Instead, a more global approach must be adopted that encompasses web optimization, search engine submissions, inclusion of references in external areas such as forums, user groups or value-added portals, the publication of articles, and the contribution of content to other websites. This expanded strategy will enhance our overall Internet presence and will enable the most popular search engines to locate a website applying a greater variety of search concepts. Lastly, by applying the feedback obtained from the web traffic reports, our global Internet presence can be continually improved and sustained to ensure consistent and effective results.

1. Make a List of Search Concepts

The first and foremost task is to come up with a list of keywords that prospective customers are likely to use when searching for your products or services. Avoid using highly technical terms, or specialized slang, if you are trying to reach an end-customer. Keep in mind that the goal here is to not simply increase the web traffic to obtain a greater number of hits, but to impact your sales volume, improve your service, and augment your company’s visibility as well. It is therefore a good idea to concentrate on those terms that directly relate to your specific business activities. Do not forget that the majority of Internet searches are performed with at least two or three keyword phrases. If you are targeting some local markets, add the name of the city, state, or local area to your search concepts. A list of 10 to 15 search concepts will be sufficient to start with. Next, sort these concepts by their level of relevance according to your own criteria. For example, if your web site offered document scanning services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a potential list of concepts could be “document scanning”, “document imaging services”, “document scanning in Texas”, “electronic document conversion”, “document imaging services in DFW”, etc. Note that if your brand or company name is not known, you should not include it as part of your most relevant search concepts since it is unlikely that it will be included during a search. On the contrary, if your brand is well known, it is a good idea to include it inside the first few search concepts.

2. Select the Search Engines

The second step consists of selecting the most popular search engines where you would like to see your company listed. You should always include at least three of the primary search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo and MSN Search), and then, if applicable, add some other engines that either specialize in your line of business, cover a geographical area, or serve a specific ethnic group (e.g. Terra for Spanish-speaking audiences).

3. Test Your Keywords

Next, ensure that your search concepts are adequate by launching queries with each one of them using your top search engines. Review the results returned in each case and verify that they indeed belong to similar companies or to competitors, perhaps. If that proves to be the case, congratulations, you have succeeded! Click on some of the results and try to locate where on the page the search concept actually appears. See if the concept is on the title of the page (the page title is the text on the top bar of the browser window, right next to the browser icon), or on the first few paragraphs, or on some section title. Go ahead and make a note of the exact location, as this will serve as a good reference to do something similar for your own web site.

4. Draft a Title for Each One of Your Web Pages

At this point, you should have finalized all your search concepts and keywords. Choose your number one search concept and use it to write a title for your home page. The ideal title should be anywhere between 6 and 10 words and ought to include the search concept, summarize the content of the page, and communicate an attractive sales proposition. Next, take the top pages for each major section (e.g. products, support, applications, company, etc.) and distribute the rest of the search concepts among them, writing a title for each page in the same manner, keeping the titles below 10 words and trying to include the search concept towards the front of the title.

Important tip: each page should have a unique title, different from all other pages. All titles should contain at least one of the search concepts plus some synonyms (e.g. if your web site is selling shoes, include in your titles terms such as “boots”, “sandals”, or “tennis shoes”.) It is typically not a good idea to simply use your company name as the page title because if someone already knows your company, they will likely know your domain as well.

5. Draft a Description for Each Page

The description of a web page is not a listing of all its contents, but two or three concise phrases that summarize what the page is trying to communicate. This description is only visible from the page’s HTML code, but many search engines do consider this text when they are classifying web pages in their results. One may think of the description as an extension of the page title, where secondary search concepts can be added (e.g. ethnic or geographical terms, additional synonyms, etc.). Each description should be unique and should include, towards the front of the text, the search concept that was used in the page title.

6. Include Keywords

Even though some years back keywords played a greater role in the positioning of web pages, it is still a good idea to include a list of keywords. Just like with the page description, the list of keywords is only visible from the page’s HTML code. Use six or seven search concepts from your list, selecting only the most relevant ones in each case, and placing the most significant ones first.

Stop now and look at some of your web pages. If your web offered “document-imaging services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area”, for example, one would expect those terms to appear several times throughout the text on your web site. If that were not the case, it would be unlikely that someone could find your web site using a combination of those terms. One must always make sure that the primary search concept selected for each page is not only included in its title, its description, and inside the keywords list, but is also used in the text of some of the paragraphs on the page itself. Additionally, the relevance of these primary search concepts can be stressed by using bold characters, or including the concept in a title or a link (e.g. instead of using “click here”, you may want to use “sign up for document imaging”.)

8. Submit Your Pages to the Search Engines

It is now time to request the search engines to revisit your web site. This time, a search engine should classify your web pages with a higher ranking for those search concepts that you selected in step one. Access the search engine’s home page and select “Add URL” or “Suggest new site” and follow their submission instructions. Finally, and here is the most difficult part, allow anywhere between 4 to 6 weeks (sometimes it could be longer, be patient!) for the search engine to process your request before testing the new results. Additional information on search engine positioning can be found here.

Conclusion

Even though there are more sophisticated and, at the same time, more labor-intensive methods for obtaining top rankings from search engines, the steps defined here will allow search engines to correctly index your web site, thus improving the chances for obtaining higher rankings. Obviously, there are companies that dedicate considerable resources to consistently obtain top positions, but nonetheless, you will notice that after implementing these simple steps, your positioning will be significantly improved and your web traffic will start to increase.
As a final word of advice, keep in mind that search engines favor web sites that regularly post fresh content. Try to renew the content of your pages from time to time and always follow the guidelines described above. Good luck, and remember to be patient!