Maximizing your web investment with Search Engine Optimization.

We’ve all Googled ourselves, some more than others. Perhaps you’ve also Googled your business. But have you ever searched for your company like a potential customer, using only keywords? Was your website high on the list of results?

If your company appears in the top three pages, Congratulations! You are either in a niche segment or spending big money promoting your firm online. But what about the majority of businesses, facing fierce competition, deemed to be irrelevant by Google?

People’s search behaviors reveal how important it is to appear in the first three pages of a result query. In 1996, Jupiter Research found that 62% of searchers clicked on an item listed on the first page, and that number increased to a dramatic 90% by the time they reached page three. This finding may be dated, but you can only guess that these numbers are becoming less forgiving.

How do you improve your placement? Introduce search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). SEO and SEM are the disciplines a website employs to improve their placement on the results page of a search engine. SEO focuses on the physical parts of your site; content, structure, and links. While SEM focuses on the promotion of your site; press releases, viral marketing, social media and pay per click campaigns.

Successful search engines realize the key to their success is in pairing user’s interests with relevant content. To provide users with the best possible results to their queries, Google, Yahoo! and other search engines deploy automated computer programs – sometimes called “spiders” – across the Internet to read and index websites. This information is processed through algorithms that tell search engines when to include a particular site on result pages.

Well conceived sites are built bottom up, focusing first on the messages to be communicated, followed by determining a corresponding structure, and then the visuals. Ironically, some of the more familiar devices such as flooding meta tags with keywords are perhaps the least influential in the eyes of any search engine in determining relevance, and may actually be more harmful.

The most important characteristics search engines evaluate when determining relevance are: the number of inbound links, the use of keywords and phrases, and the site’s inherent structure. Armed with this knowledge, there are several SEO steps you can take to improve your site’s position in search results. On a recent project, we successfully addressed some of these steps while developing a new website for Virginia Drilling Company (VDC).

With VDC, we requested a list of search terms to be associated with the company. Using this list, we researched which keywords people were actually using and the level of competition among sites vying to be listed in search results for those terms. Based on our findings, we chose about 25 keywords/phrases to work into the VDC site. Next, we dealt with the site’s structure, taking care to ensure search engines could index it quickly and easily. As a result of our efforts, VDC appeared on the very first page of Google’s search results for many of the keywords we targeted.

Depending on your budget and business goals, additional SEO methods are available.
When you’re ready to upgrade to a new site, use SEO to make your web investment work harder for you – and make more people aware of the excellent product or service you provide.

Take the SEO test! Visit a search engine and enter keywords potential customers might use in seeking your products or services. Not satisfied with the results? Contact SPINE!

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