Straight to the Point

Volume 2, Issue 3

This Issue's Contents:

Feature: Keep Your Website Top of the Charts
Guest contributor Todd Coopee, President of Industrial Media Inc. outlines the importance of Search Engine Optimization and Registration. He also contributes to our complimentary white paper on the topic.

Apply It!: Improve Your Search Engine IQ
Five no-cost exercises to improve your search-engine "IQ" in one week. These concrete exercises are designed to help you maximize your web site's performance on search engines.

Service in Brief: Website Audit Package
A self-contained package to ensure that you extract the most returns from your web marketing efforts. Learn what's included in the package, and the price.

Don't Take Our Word For It
Peek inside the Search Engine success of Roaring Penguin Software.

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Keep Your Website on Top of the Charts

- by Todd Coopee

Search engines are used over 95% of the time by people looking to find information on the Web - making them the No. 1 tool for information retrieval on the Net. - CNET News

In the world of pop music, registering a top-10 hit remains a valid benchmark for success. The same benchmark can be applied to search engine rankings on the Internet, where placing in the top 10 can result in increased site traffic, additional revenue opportunities, and enhanced customer relations - all without spending additional advertising dollars.

Unfortunately, with well over a billion pages on the Internet, it is difficult to establish and maintain top-10 staying power. To make matters worse, establishing a high search engine ranking is more of an art than a science. Securing a place near the top of one search engine, like Ask Jeeves/Teoma, does not necessarily guarantee a successful search ranking with other engines or on-line directories, like Google and Yahoo/Overture.

For this reason, proper website promotion should include search engine optimization and registration. In this article I will define what these two concepts mean to a business seeking to improve or maintain good search engine performance. I also touch on the importance of having a balanced web marketing plan - one that combines "free" web marketing with paid tactics.

Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing a website for best possible performance on search engines (like Google) and web directories (like Yahoo) is an ever-evolving process. Competition for the top spots causes the results of search engines to routinely change, and search engines also periodically change the manner in which they index sites and pages.

To effectively optimize a website for good search engine performance requires a general understanding of how search engines evaluate a website. While each engine and directory differs in the algorithm it uses to assess a site's rank for a particular search, all consider some combination of three criteria:

• Link Popularity
  A web page's Link Popularity is a score based on the number of incoming links pointing that page. In general, the more incoming links the better. Of course, there are exceptions to this generalization depending on how much priority the search engine places on page reputation and page importance. You can run a check on your link popularity at: http://www.linkpopularity.com.
  
  
• Page Reputation
  Page Reputation is a score based on what other pages' title and links are "saying" about your page. This is by far the most important factor of the three - because it is the hardest measure and to artificially manipulate.
  
  
• Page Importance
  Page Importance is also referred to as PageRank due to the fact that Google produces a "rating" of pages by the same name. Google's PageRank rating has become an industry standard. Google provides a free tool to measure PageRank at: http://toolbar.google.com.

Maximizing your website's popularity, reputation and importance is a multi-faceted and ongoing process, which we have outlined in detail in the white paper, "Nine Habits of Effective Website Ranking."

Search Engine Registration

Because you have no control over which Internet search tools people may use to find your site, it is important to register with all the major ones. Google and Yahoo are today the top two "gotta-be-there" search platforms, and should be central to any search campaign that you undertake. Register your site with Google, Yahoo and any other search engine considered key in your industry. And remember: site registration isn't a one-time event. Make a commitment to keep track of your ranking results and boost them whenever necessary.

A Balanced Web Marketing Plan

Companies are increasingly aware of the importance of good search performance to their success. Many also erroneously believe that search engines provide a "free" way to quickly establish a brand. Unfortunately, however, search engines have not managed to erode the reality that, in marketing there is usually a trade-off between time and money.

Given time, the search optimization practices outlined in our "Nine Habits of Effective Website Ranking" white paper will dramatically improve a website's search engine ranking, with the only cost being the human resource(s) involved in executing and maintaining the best practices. But, to achieve top search results quickly, pay-per-click advertising and paid directory listings are usually necessary, at least to start.

A balanced web marketing plan will combine paid and non-paid practices in the marketing communications mix. A search campaign may rely primarily on paid tactics for the first few months while the "free" search performance strategies are put into place. Typically, increased competition will begin to diminish the effectiveness of pay-per-click advertising as competitors with larger budgets continue to up the fiscal ante. But when done well, you should find that, as pay-per-click results begin to diminish, your non-paid search engine optimization tactics will start to kick in and drive traffic to your site on their own.

Todd Coopee is a Principal at Industrial Media (www.industrialmedia.ca), a full-service Internet agency in Ottawa. For a detailed explanation of search strategy and concrete steps to create a strong search strategy, download this complimentary white paper.

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Apply It!: How to Improve Your Search Engine IQ

With the kids back in school, there's more time to focus on your own learning. Below you'll find five exercises - one for each workday in the week - designed to boost your search engine IQ. You can also download our "Nine Habits of Effective Website Ranking" white paper, which elaborates on these methods and tactics to improve your site's web performance.

DAY 1
Find yourself.

Set aside an hour to find yourself on the web. When you do, assess, from the perspective of a potential customer or other desired audience member, how your web site presents itself on search engines. Specifically: what does your search engine result say? Does it convey anything meaningful? Assess whether the bold text (title) clearly states the brand name and what it is in two or three words. Also consider the brief description below this bold text - does it convey what kind of audience your web site is for? If not, it's probably time to enlist Kaszas Communications to improve your web content.

Try it! Search for "Kaszas Communications" on Google. Our metadata is written to clearly define what services we offer, and for whom.

DAY 2
Go hunting.

Search engine users are on the hunt for information - products, ideas, expertise and more. To improve your own search engine IQ, you need to be aware of what those users find when they go hunting. Perform searches on various engines and directories, using keywords relevant to your industry. What do you find? And, is it what you want searchers to find? If not, you'll want to check out the Website Audit Package, a critical service provided by Kaszas Communications and Industrial Media.

DAY 3
Optimize your online pitch.

The way you think about or talk about your business may or may not be similar to the way your prospective customers search for it on the web. An optimal online "elevator pitch" will present itself to web users in such a way that mirrors their own ideas about what they are looking for.

Take a look at your standard elevator pitch, also known as a "boilerplate" or "tombstone" (the blurb that you include at the end of a press release). Now follow these steps:

1. Shorten it to 20 words
2. Count the number of key search terms included in those 20 words
3. Boost the number of key search terms in the boilerplate to 3-5

This will become your online pitch. Incorporate it into your web site metadata, online directory listings, and other relevant instances of your online pitch.

DAY 4
Introduce pull mechanisms to drive traffic to your web site.

Be proactive in demanding attention for your website. It is a marketing tool that can help you accomplish the difficult task of quantifying return on your marketing investment. That makes the web a critical piece of the marketing mix, and one worth exploiting to its fullest. For this exercise, consider your three most current or most recent outreach campaigns (direct mail, newsletter, trade show exhibit, etc.). For each of those tactics, come up with at least one (more) way that you can use each to encourage web site visits. Download out our white paper for even more such ideas.

DAY 5
Kick-start a reciprocal link campaign.

The number of web sites that link to your own site is a factor considered in a search engine's determination of a site's rank on a given search. Start asking your business partners and other relevant web site owners within your industry if there is a logical place to include a link to your site in their own. And, expect to return the favor - that's why it's called reciprocal.

But, before you start wallpapering your web site with third-party links and painting the web with your links, establish a reciprocal link policy to protect your brand. Our white paper tells how to do this.

REVIEW

Review and repeat steps 1-5 every six months.

ENLIST THE PROFESSIONALS

Kaszas Communications and its web partner, Industrial Media, can assist you in all of these areas. Contact us about these and other services:

• Website Audit Package
• Web site design and development, including dynamic content, content management systems, e-commerce sites and more
• Web site architecture and writing, including effective metadata and keyword density
• Web hosting and web traffic statistics

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Service in Brief: Website Audit Package

Have us audit your website - you'll get a detailed report on the improvements to make to enhance its overall effectiveness, as well as its search engine ranking. The Website Audit Package includes:

• Technical assessment (code, standards, e-commerce, middleware, etc.)
• Hosting environment assessment
• Key word assessment and review
• Metadata review
• Content review: structure, organization, navigation, flow between sections, use of keywords
• Design and usability review

...all clearly documented in a written report, with recommendations.

At $2500, the Website Audit package is a valuable tool to extract the most from your web marketing efforts. Kaszas Communications and Industrial Media include this vital exercise free of charge in all joint web development projects valued at $15,000 or more.*

Contact us today to get started.

* To qualify for this offer, the web development project must be purchased within six months of the Website Audit Package.

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Don't Take Our Word For It

Search Engine Optimization 101 Valedictorian

Roaring Penguin Software's website is a strong example of good search engine optimization practice. Kaszas Communications recently worked with Industrial Media to re-launch the site, complete with strong keyword usage and metadata.

You can see some of the techniques we used:

1. Visit www.roaringpenguin.com
   
   
2. Note that the company's primary keyword ("anti-spam") is included in its main navigation. The navigation is HTML, not a graphic, and will therefore be crawled by search engines because it is primary text on the site.
   
   
3. Browse through the "Anti-Spam Products" section, paying attention to the first paragraph of text on each page. You might notice some bad copy editing... "anti spam" is sometimes spelled "anti-spam" or "antispam". That's because our research showed that searchers spell the phrase differently - these were the top three spellings of "anti-spam" searched for on engines, and for that reason we've used all three versions throughout the site.
   
   
4. On your browser, click View, then Source to see the HTML page code
   
   
1. Take note of the "<meta name =" data incorporated into each page of the site.
   
   
2. Note the meta keywords, including the multiple spellings of words and phrases.
   
   
3. Note the meta description, which is the sentence that appears in search engine results: it includes the company's top keywords as well as concisely describing who should visit the website.
   
   
4. Note that each page has a unique meta title (which displays at the top of your browser window when you view the page), as well as a unique meta description. We've customized the meta titles to be specific to each page - take a look at the difference between the meta name TITLEs on these pages: http://www.roaringpenguin.com/anti_spam/index.php and http://www.roaringpenguin.com/partners/index.php.
   
   
5. Also, note that almost every page contains the keywords "anti spam" and "CanIt" (the product brand) in the first sentence.

In addition, we ensure that all of Roaring Penguin's advertisements promote the website address. Likewise, the company's Internet ads direct click-throughs to unique tracking URLs that allow us to gauge the success of particular ads with particular advertisers over specific periods of time.