Internet Exposure - Low Cost, High Returns
by: Julie Sutton-Yardley
Optimizing Exposure – How it Works
Web
designers and programmers embedded Meta Tags and Meta Tag descriptions into
their websites in an effort to increase their chances of being picked up by the
various search engines. In the earlier days of search engines such as Yahoo and
Lycos, smart programmers would bury keywords in web pages by using the same
colour font as the background to achieve the same effect. As search engines
became and continue to become more intelligent, these and other similar tactics
no longer work and in fact hinder the ability to be recognized by these search
engines. The unfortunate fact is that Google has become the gorilla of the
search engine industry and it’s heuristic algorithms for indexing websites has
been more closely guarded than KFC’s seven herbs and spices and McDonald’s
secret sauce combined.
Given the above, no one has a
crystal ball that can make a website appear as the first non-sponsored website
in a keyword search on Google or any other search engine but there are a few
things that companies can do to improve their position by understanding some
simple concepts about how Google and others are evolving.
Simply put, search engines have been
evolving into an almost artificial intelligence entity. They no longer look for
Meta Tags or simple words buried in the content of the site to determine the
website’s ranking. Search engines now use relevance and popularity to determine
ranking. Therefore companies need to determine how to increase both relevance
and popularity to improve their websites ranking in desired keyword searches.
Although relevance and popularity are considered mutually distinct topics they
should be considered symbiotically to build importance.
“Relevance” is now the Buzz Word
Content of a website is what search
engines use to determine relevance. Although the search engines are becoming
smarter, they still have some trouble with Flash content. Although Flash is a
great way to increase curb appeal, it does little to increase relevance.
Website content needs to be carefully written and incorporated to replicate the
corporate message and what it feels is relevant to its audience. There is a
fine line between repeating relevant content enough times to affect search
engine optimization (SEO) and making the site less readable and enjoyable by
those entering the site. The words used in web site content are intricate
components to increasing relevance.
Supporting
documentation is also important in building relevance. Word, PDF and other types
of documents are all searched by search engine spiders and robots that are used
to help determine a site’s relevance. What types of documents do you need to add
to your site to increase your ranking? Case studies, press releases, articles,
white papers are only some examples.
Popularity
Often companies that started high in
the search engine rankings stay high in the rankings. This is no coincidence.
By having a high ranking site, i.e., being ranked 1 -10 on the first page of the
search result, sites are visited more often than others and therefore their
popularity continues to rise. The task at hand for most companies is breaking
that first page barrier. It was thought that by buying click-through ads,
eventually the site would become more popular and thus organically rise through
the search engine rankings and find itself on the first page in a short time.
This is rarely the case in a highly competitive keyword category.
If companies cannot build popularity
through search engines, they need to start doing it through less traditional
means. Links, filtering mechanisms, partnership links, video testimonials,
product reviews, training videos, and/or corporate presentation videos just to
name a few options.
Blogs
–New Age Internet Marketing Tool
Blogs are an excellent example of
sites that can be strategically used to increase the popularity of a corporate
site. Using a product like Blogger, recently acquired by Google, individuals
can create Blog content that is relevant to a specific subject, while building
links back to the corporate site. Google indexes changes to Blogger Blogs
within hours and because a corporate website is linked to the Blog site and the
article published (hopefully), it too is re-indexed; increasing its popularity
and over time search engine ranking. Technorati, a search engine vehicle
dedicated to Blogs, has a tool that allows Blog publishers to ping the
Technorati search engine every time they publish to their Blog. Because of the
dynamic nature of Technorati, Google has dedicated spiders that index it and
therefore creating a mechanism to increase indexing at a much faster pace than
traditional websites.
Companies and organizations need to
encourage links back to their corporate website and each other’s Blogs. Setting
up RSS feeds to all of the above would make it easier for visitors to be
notified of changes, special offers, promotions and encourage more frequent website
visits, thus increasing the Blogs popularity, which in turn, increases its relevance,
thus increasing the relevance of the corporate site.
In a similar fashion, by adding to
relevant content to sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, MyYahoo and other
less traditional sites, there is opportunity to increase both popularity and relevance.
This can be achieved by posting non active, active and interactive mechanisms
to
YouTube, MySpace and all the Blogs previously mentioned. Because each of these
sites has their own search engine tagging solution, which are fed by the person
posting the video clip, it gives companies a chance to create their own meta
tags which will eventually be indexed by the larger search engines like Google
and Yahoo. Even if no one actually watches a video or participates in an
interactive site option from the sites mentioned above, the fact that they have
been indexed and linked back directly or indirectly to the corporate site,
increases the corporate site’s relevance and popularity.
A company or organizations’ partners
and employees should be set up on specific sites – sites that people can use to
set up internet bookmarks. This is important because Google indexes certain sites
that are bookmarked regularly. By creating a network of users, all book-marking
intertwines with other websites and Blogs that all link back to the corporate
site that will ultimately increase the organic ranking of the corporate site.
The
ultimate goal is to increase the organic ranking in order to decrease the
dependency on pay-per-click advertising. Eventually, an organization can reduce
its SEM (Search Engine Marketing) budget and use that money for other more
efficient marketing programs. It is believed that organic links from search
engines produce higher click-through rates than pay-per-click ads, ultimately
increasing traffic to a corporate site and increasing downloads that can be
turned into generating revenue.
It is important to understand that
what worked well several years ago to drive traffic to a website doesn’t
necessarily work today. And the things that are implemented today may not work
well in the future. The internet moves at a different time-space continuum than
the rest of the world and SEO and SEM are no exception. Truthfully, there are
many things a company can do to increase website traffic without spending excessive
amounts of money.
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