Lost in the Web?

Your website looks good, and is up to date and informative, but it is not generating any enquiries. Why not? A website, however attractive, is no use to your business if people aren’t finding it and browsing through it. It’s a bit like printing hundreds of well designed and informative flyers and then piling them all in the corner of your office.

So how do you get your website seen? You should of course make use of traditional media; make sure your website address is on all your outgoing emails, letters, and marketing materials. And, you could employ other marketing communications techniques, such as advertising, press relations or direct mail, to raise awareness of your website address.

However, you need to do more. Studies have consistently shown that around 85 percent of Internet consumers use search engines and directories to look for products, services and information. In order to get visitors, your site needs to be showing up in the search results. However, Web users are impatient, and rarely look beyond the first three pages of results, so your site actually needs to be showing up within the first 30 results. And on top of that, you need to be reaching your target audience. There’s no point attracting visitors looking for oven chips if what you sell are microchips.

There are three stages to a good ‘search engine marketing’ strategy:
• your site needs to be search engine friendly
• you need plenty of links to it from other websites
• you need to ensure that the search engines are indexing it.

Site design – keywords and architecture
Search engines use software robots (‘spiders’) to survey the web and build their databases. Web documents are retrieved and indexed. When a user enters a query at a search engine website, what they write is checked against the search engine's keyword indices. A search engine friendly site is one that the search engine spiders can access, can read, and will index under relevant keywords.

Keywords are the words and phrases that visitors to a search engine will use to find a website. Words like business and sales are targeted by thousands of companies so your site is unlikely to appear high in the results. Instead of using generic terms, you need to find a few niche key phrases that tie directly into your business, and then incorporate them into the text on your page, as well as the html scripts that sit behind your page.

In order for your site to be indexed properly, spiders need to be able to crawl through your site unhindered. Flash pages, Javascript menus, graphic links, active server pages and frames can all cause a spider to miss out pages. If you want people looking for LCD displays to find your site, the page about LCD displays needs to be indexed in the search engines, so it is essential to ensure that the search engine spiders can access it easily.

Link popularity
Your ‘link popularity’ is the number of other websites which link to your site. Most search engines use link popularity as a factor in determining the search engine ranking of a web site, so if you have plenty of links from good, relevant sites, your own website will appear higher in the results. Links from other sites that focus on the same keyword phrases your site focuses on, and links from relevant categories in major directories and industry specific portals will boost your position. Links from sites that focus on topics that have nothing to do with your site probably won't help, so don’t spend time or money on them.

Site submission
Only once you are sure that your site is properly ‘optimised’ for the search engines is it worth submitting it. However, there is still no point going wild and submitting to hundreds of engines that no-one has ever heard of. Only the top few really matter, because they are the ones that people actually use, and also because information from their indexes feeds other engines. A limited but carefully targeted submission campaign is all you need.

Whether or not you pay for submissions depends on how much of a hurry you are in. Most of the engines do accept free submissions, and for most sites this is enough. However, don’t expect to see your site at the top of the results immediately. It can take weeks for a search engine to get round to sending their spider to your site. If your target market is competitive and/or you require your website to be listed more quickly it may be worth looking at paid inclusion. Search engines and directories such as Inktomi and Yahoo offer pay-for-inclusion (PFI) services for a fairly low fee that will ensure your site is indexed fast. If you are really desperate for visibility in search engine listings then pay-per-click (PPC) may be the answer. This is a type of search marketing, effectively advertising on search listings, where you bid for specific search keywords or phrases and pay this bid price every time your ad is clicked by a visitor.

Directories are different from crawler-type search engines in that the information is compiled by human editors. Again, it is often worth submitting to one of the larger directories because their information feeds into the search engines. Companies operating within small, tightly defined, market segments may actually find that a few specialist directories can render them visible to almost every potential customer there is for their products or services.

The next step
The above is just an overview of the process needed to attract relevant, targeted visitors to your website. If you are interested in finding out more, you can find endless information on the subject on the Web, as well as many specialist search engine optimisation companies.

Meanwhile if you would like to talk to Vector about your website, email us at enquiries@vector.co.uk or call Ian Walker or Stephanie Woodyer on 01442 877167.