Document View

Research shows that, unlike in the past, people today look for information using search engines rather than typing in random URLs. As web content is created and uploaded faster than search engines can index it all, it's getting more difficult to be discovered in a growing mass of unindexed and unconnected pages. And some users are growing impatient with engines, discouraged by the thousands of hits they get after typing in a few words. So, to increase the chance of viewers clicking on your website, you want to be in the top two, three or four listings. Most people will simply not bother scrolling down further. Don't underestimate the importance. Business-to-business and business-to-consumer customers are increasingly using search engines to find vendors - and from the results of these searches, they are actually buying. Ten tips for making a site rank highly in a search are presented.

We all use them. Lycos. Dogpile. Ask Jeeves. AltaVista. They're search engines, those indispensable sites that can help you find an Internet needle in a haystack. In fact, Google, the world's most widely used search engine, executes 200 million searches each day. But have you ever stopped to consider the challenges you face in having your enterprise found on search engines, or, more important, having your website rank highly in the pages identified by them?

Research shows that, unlike in the past, people today look for information using search engines rather than typing in random URLs (the line in the browser window that begins "http://www") and hoping for the best. For instance, they no longer bother with www.hotel.com expecting to find a hotel; they know it will lead them to a travel industry portal. But as web content is created and uploaded faster than search engines can index it all, it's getting more difficult to be discovered in a growing mass of unindexed and unconnected pages. And some users are growing impatient with engines, discouraged by the thousands of hits they get after typing in a few words. So, to increase the chance of viewers clicking on your website, you want to be in the top two, three or four listings. Most people will simply not bother scrolling down further.

Don't underestimate the importance. Business-to-business and business-to-consumer customers are increasingly using search engines to find vendorsand from the results of these searches, they are actually buying. The Canadian Inter@ctive Reid Report, produced by market-research and polling firm Ipsos-Reid, found that a significant percentage of Canadians research products online. A total of 43% of active Internet users researched consumer electronics products online; 36% looked into air travel and 27% into automobiles.

Here are 10 tips for making your site rank highly in a search:

SUBMIT YOUR URL

1 URL means "uniform resource locator." The business model for many search engines is similar to the one periodicals use: create content to attract the viewer or reader and sell that demographic to advertisers. Search engines allow content producers to submit URLs, which increases the collection of indexed pages and further contributes to the value of the collection. That, in turn, attracts users and creates a stronger demographic to sell to advertisers. But the leading search engines do not always make it easy to submit a URL-and there are a number of consulting entities that facilitate submissions for fees.

For a small company, proactively submitting URLs is relatively easy. It usually begins with clicking on "Submit URL," which can often be found on the bottom right-hand side of a search engine's main page. Doing that for multiple search engines can be time consuming, so, in a Darwinian way, sites have evolved that allow you to click through a series of steps to have your URL submitted to a number of search engines simultaneously. (Examples include submit-away.com, submit-it.com and selfpromotion.com.) Some sites provide multiple submission services for a fee; other advertising-driven sites do it for free.

One cautionary note: be suspicious of sites that claim to mass-submit your URL to dozens or hundreds of search engines. There are fewer than 10 major search engines you care about being found in (among them Yahoo, AltaVista and, of course, the search engine that has even become a verb, Google).

CONSIDER PAYING FOR SUBMISSION SERVICES

2 While cost-conscious firms may shy away from paid submission services, such as paid inclusion, there are often valid reasons to make the investment. Dennis Buchheim, general manager of paid inclusion at Inktomi (owned by Yahoo), explains that paid submission not only helps provide consumers with relevant results, it also helps businesses ensure their presence in algorithmic search results. Paid inclusion services allow you to receive reports that contain such information as the particular words used by searchers who found your site and clicked on it. Such info is valuable, since it allows website owners to make further adjustments and refinements to rank even higher.

TAILOR YOUR CONTENT

3 Search-engine indexing software programs, nicknamed "spiders" to reflect how they crawl through web pages, record several aspects of a page, including the actual text. In the record, the spiders identify the frequency of particular words on a page; that becomes part of a complicated algorithm to calculate the value. If one page contained the word "cancer" four times and another page contained the word 12 times, and maybe also in the title of the page, the second page would rank higher. The algorithm also calculates and ranks how words are connected to other words, such as, for instance, "car parts," "car finance" or "car warranty" on an auto dealer's web page.

Knowing that word count has been part of the indexing algorithm, webmasters up to 2001 tried to cheat the spiders. Conniving web-page authors have been known to add dozens or hundreds of key words at the bottom of a page, in white font on a white background-invisible to surfers, but picked up by spiders. While some engines have tried to create algorithms that cannot be tricked, the technique can still be an effective and simple method of getting their attention.

TWEAK THE TITLE

4 The title (not the file name) of the page is the series of words that show up at the top of the browser so that when people bookmark it they can find what they are looking for later. The title should be carefully crafted, since it works in combination with the meta description tags-the phrases and short sentences that will appear under the title of the page in search-engine results. Considering that many medium-size and large corporate pages are flush with image content, Flash, frames and other things not easily recognized by spiders, AltaVista, for one, suggests that the title of the page is even more important when the page has little text.

PAY ATTENTION TO THOSE META TAGS

5 There are several kinds of meta tags, but only two arc critical for managers: meta description tags and meta keyword tags. The attractiveness of the former, which appear under the title on search-engine results, can be the reason why a searcher decides to click or not click on your link, so craft them as carefully as possible. Some savvy webmasters actually hire consultants to write these meta description tag words.

Meta keyword tags are key words and phrases in the background code at the top of the web page. In the late 1990s, spiders used meta keyword tags to pick up "clues" as to page content-akin to reading song titles on an album cover. Since so many web-page authors misrepresented content with misleading tag words, meta keyword tags have fallen out of search engines' favour. Inktomi's Buchheim says that its search engine pays little attention to meta keyword tags, and some search engines, such as AOL Search, don't use software that responds to them. Rather, the sites have people look at submitted URLs and determine if they should be included. While more expensive than relying exclusively on spiders, the subsequent indexed compilation has greater value and attracts a more discriminating demographic.

On the other hand, it's simple to pack a lot of words into meta keyword tags, so many web authors still use the technique, even though its golden years were 1999, 2000 and 2001.

CULTIVATE LINKS IN

6 "The quality and number of websites that link to yours can influence its standing with the search engines," says Detlev Johnson, an internationally recognized expert in search-engine optimization. Johnson, vice-president of technology at Position Technologies, an Inktomi partner, adds that the task of cultivating links in entails not simply getting lots of sites to link to you, but also attracting sites of quality, where the referring page is considered important. Finding a way for good sites to link to yours will cause your site to rank higher, and could also mean people can find your site without even going through a search engine. After all, the key objective is to get people to see your page.

Obtaining links in from other sites may be difficult for a new domain, but if you give the other sites a concrete reason to provide your URL, you increase your exposure. Other than simple reciprocity, you could offer to identify other sites with a brief paragraph on your site. This "extra mile" might endear you to a site that would otherwise turn you down. Good customer relations can help, too. Companies can request that their customers, who have websites, link in to you, and, if you have membership in an industry association or chamber of commerce, you can request that the organization's site provide a link to your firm's domain. Search engines consider links in from customers and industry associations highly.

Extensive offline networking is essential, which is why this is more of a management challenge than a technical one. Finding out who is already linking to your site is simple. Go to a search engine, type "link:www.[your domain]" in the search field, and several of the sites that are linked to yours will appear. Many of these pages may be from your own domain, but you may be surprised to find others showing up, as well. If they are quality sites, you might want to contact them and offer to reciprocate.

BEWARE LINKS OUT

7 Sometimes sites whose bread and butter is hits and click-throughs, such as domains with adult or gambling content, make links out to many sites hoping it will increase their hub value. A few years ago, it might have been useful to take that approach, but by 2001 and 2002 the value of links out declined significantly.

EXPLOIT LINK EXCHANGES AND LINK RECIPROCITY

8 Search engines value two-way links more than one-way links. If your webmaster is trying to add two-way links, you as a manager should consider the time demands of making contact with various organizations to set up such reciprocity. Reciprocal links require a management evaluation of a relationship with another enterprise, and that's not just a technical matter.

To find sites to link to (and to you), you might consider paying for the services of link exchanges and link farms. Some consider them useful because they might increase your search-engine ranking, but a number of industry experts are critical of them. Michael Wong, of www.mikes-marketing-tools.com of Burbank, Calif., warns: "Never ever use links from link exchange sites and link farms." Wong says they produce "heavily crosslinked pages on one or more websites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites."

Many of the top search engines consider such links as spam, so stay clear of these types of links. Jon Click, director of Internet search for AltaVista, confirms that for its purposes, links that come from link farms are considered spam-and if a site has too many, it might be dropped from listings.

GIVE IT TIME

9 If you want a web page to rank high in a search, it helps if it has been on the web long enough to be indexed by the major search engines. It simply stands to reason: since the volume and complexity of web content is increasing faster than the rate at which search-engine spiders can catalogue and index it, having a page online for several months increases the likelihood that it will be found. Pages that have been online for a year or two are invariably found by all of the Top 10 search engines and have an advantage over pages that have just been uploaded a week or two ago.

UPDATE FREQUENTLY

10 For search results that involve human interpretation of the site content, updating your web page frequently will help. That's because the people evaluating your pages will tend to rank a regularly updated site more highly than they would a site on which the content is static. (Search results driven completely by an algorithm do not usually include in their ranking scores any information about the date of the page.)

AFTER YOU'VE ATTENDED to these 10 points, how can you measure your success? You can find out how effectively you're attracting search-engine spiders by viewing access logs. Most of the major regional and national (SPs that offer site-hosting services provide monitoring packages that allow customers to review traffic-related information, such as access logs, number of daily hits and bytes downloaded. A spider that has crawled through your site will leave a record in the access logs.

Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, suggests, "If you know what to look for, you can tell when a spider has come to call. That can save you worrying that you haven't been visited. You can tell exactly what a robot has recorded or failed to record."

So will following these steps provide a path to web riches and hordes of satisfied customers? Well, in a highly competitive environment, where the volume of web content is growing tremendously, it's like making your store sign bigger, and in colour, and with lights, in a growing mall where all the other stores have black-and-white cardboard signs.