Secrets To Search Engine Success 

by Alexis D. Gutzman

It's no secret that one of the largest concerns for many Web sites is being found in search engines. Companies exist for the sole purpose of improving your rankings (boosting your site to the top 10 or 20 or 30) in search results -- for a fee of course. What can be a source of confusion for many people is that search engine rankings and how they work differ from site to site. Some search engines rank your site more highly based on how many links to your site they find (Google). Others rank your site based on how often your links are clicked on when they appear in their listings (DirectHit). Still other search engines give you the option of bidding on keywords so that your site ranks at the top of their search results when a visitor enters your keywords; you pay only when a visitor clicks through to your site (GoTo, Ah-ha). In this small space, I'm not even going to attempt to reproduce the vast wealth of knowledge you can get from the Search Engine Watch site (www.searchenginewatch.com) or from Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Newsletter, which you can subscribe to at the site. However, I can offer a few words of advice to get you started on making your site more accessible via the search engines. 

Key Tactics

The question that very few search engine resources address should be the most fundamental of all: What keywords do you want to be found on? The answer rests on two considerations: What keywords are your prospective visitors likely to use to find you and what keywords would prospective buyers be likely to use to find you? 

I believe that many sites that are trying valiantly to be ranked are trying to be ranked on the wrong keywords. Ideally, my latest online project, GoodRepute.com, would be ranked #1 for every keyword from e-mail to viral marketing to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. I want every mother looking for brownie recipes to find my site, right? Not necessarily. How much energy is it really worth for me to be found for keywords that aren't going to be typed by my most qualified, ready-to-buy, prospects? 

Perhaps on free search engines I want to be ranked as highly as possible on every conceivable keyword, but not if I have to spend much time keeping my stellar rankings. In reality, few sites that are highly ranked are thus ranked without a significant expenditure of man-hours on keeping that high ranking. The better measure of the cost/popularity/competitiveness of keywords can be found in a quick visit to one of the bid-for-keywords search engines, such as GoTo.com or Ah-ha.com. 

I particularly like these search engines because it's easy to see what a keyword is worth to the sites being listed. For example, at GoTo.com (for April 2000) the top bidder for "computers" is paying $3.00 per click, and the top bidder for "Pentium III" is paying only $.62 per click. From this information, it's clear that, in the eyes of the sites being listed, being found for the keyword "computers" is five times more valuable than being found for the keyword Pentium III. Another instructive example are the keywords "cell phones," which went for $1.38 per click, while the keyword "Samsung 3500" (a specific model of cell phone) went for $.03 per click. Based on the evidence above, you might be easily convinced that the keyword "computers" is five times more valuable than the keyword "Pentium III," and that the keywords "cell phones" is 42 times more valuable than the keyword "Samsung 3500." However, do you really believe that a visitor (looking to buy a new computer), who is searching on the word "computers" is more likely to make a purchase than the one typing "Pentium III?" I doubt it. With cell phones it's a no-brainer. If the visitor knows the model number of the phone he wants, he's far more qualified to make a purchase, and far further into the buying cycle than a visitor who's just typing cell phones. 

Don't you want the most qualified visitors? Don't you want to pay as little as possible (in dollars and in energy) for your high search engine rankings? If so, then you should be putting more energy into selecting the right keywords and less energy into being ranked highly for the most general keywords that describe what you sell. Does anyone looking for a portable CD player type "consumer electronics?" Yet merchants on GoTo.com are willing to pay up to $.68 per click for that keyword! 

Location, Location, Location

You can waste a lot of time and money on being found for stupid or irrelevant keywords. One of the advantages of outsourcing your Web site rankings is that the company you choose may have some expertise in picking the right keywords. Then again, they may not. 

The bottom line is that you need to know your site, know your products, and know what your customers want well enough in order to know what keywords your most qualified customers are probably searching on at search engines. Then, you need to take the time to communicate those keywords either to your marketing staff that's working on your rankings, to the company you've selected to get you ranked, or to the search engines through appropriate text and META tags. There's no shortcut to being seen in the right places. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com

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