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Diary of an SEO trial (part 1)

This is the first in a series of articles about my own experiences in finding an SEO company then embarking on a six- month trial. The objective is to improve the visibility of our website. The trial is currently underway and I don?t yet know how it will turn out, but I hope sharing the experience will be useful in helping you avoid some of the potential pitfalls.

Google dominates the search engine market with over 60 per cent market share. Yahoo is some way behind in second place and others pale into insignificance. Yesterday I was searching on Google for a replacement watch after my old faithful finally conked out. The search for ?Accurist Watch? resulted in paid for listings at the top (up to three results) and right hand side (eight results). These pay per click (PPC) adverts are from companies who pay for each click through to their website.

The cost of pay per click searches varies on how competitive the search term is. If you pay for example 30 pence per click and then convert two per cent of traffic, then each order will cost you £15. Shows how valuable the free natural
listings are.

From my search, Google also delivered 10 results on the main body of the page, these are the natural listings. Google is incredibly good at delivering the right pages in these natural listings for any given search. This is why it is the dominant global leader. Its techniques are extremely clever. For those fortunate web pages that are naturally listed on the first page it means free advertising. How wonderful! So the big question is: ?How do I get free advertising by appearing in the natural search listings?? Well, the simple answer is: ?To have the most relevant pages for that particular search!? But the reality is if you sell ?Accurist watches?, what on earth do you need to get on the first page?

Where do you start? What makes Google think your site is a fantastic reference for this topic?
The real answer is that if people think your site is a fantastic reference for the topic, then by and large so will Google. If you have an informative, relevant, interesting page about Accurist watches then you will get a good page rank. On the other hand if you just have a product picture and price with no information, Google will give you a low page rank.

Formatting rules
There are some formatting rules to apply - here are a couple of examples:

1) If you were in a library looking for books about Accurist watches, you might start with any that were titled Accurist watches. Google applies a similar rule. If the title of your browser window is Accurist watches then it probably indicates the content of the page is relevant to this subject, Google does look at this as part of its algorithm to rank your page.

2) Images on web pages have what is called an ALT attribute for those people who cannot display images or see the image either due to a slow connection or disability. These attributes should always be programmed by your web designer and have a meaningful name related to the image. As Google cannot see images, it reads the ALT attribute to identify what images are on the page. Well documented images certainly help Google rank your page.

On the other hand, metatags, which consist of hidden text used to describe your website to search engines, are much less important than they used to be in the 1990s because search engines have become far more sophisticated. Optimising your website is about adding layer upon layer to help Google relate specific search terms to it, but these layers must be built on a good foundation. If you want to check the foundations of your website, a quick, very basic test is to check on one of your product pages, if the product name appears in the title of the window, it?s a good start.

What will an SEO company do?
An SEO company will tune your website to become more relevant for certain specific search terms. To do this they will change code, text, presentation, and structure. They may also solve problems that could prevent search engines from properly understanding (indexing) your site. You may also find they will actually add unique content to improve its relevance for your terms as well as making the site more appealing to users. Finally they should provide regular reports showing how your site is better listed as a result of their efforts.

There are a various unethical tactics which some SEO companies utilise. Google will blacklist your site if it looks like you are trying to unfairly manipulate search engine listings, so great care must be taken before employing an SEO company and you might want to protect yourself through an agreement which stipulates what would happen if you were blacklisted.

What to watch out for
Google provides a checklist to help identify SEO companies that might employ unethical practices (to find it visit www.tinyurl.com/29mjbn).

Here are a few of them.
? No one can guarantee a number one listing on Google.
?Any company that is secretive or won?t clearly explain what they will do. You should ask how much of their time you will be getting for your money and a list of tasks, what will the visible outputs be so that you can check what they are doing?
?Always ask for references and check at least three of them out. Do not accept any excuses here. I have experiences of companies approaching retailers telling them just how much money they can make online if they used their SEO service. They talk of sums over £100,000 per year. Yet when I checked the companies websites out their Google rankings were awful, and so were their reference sites.

Next time I will be looking at how the SEO company was selected and how we addressed the decision of staying in the UK or looking further afield.

September/October 2010
issue 61
available now