With internet sales nearly 15% of all UK sales (and forecast to reach 40% of sales by 2020) it has never been more important to get your site to the top of the search engines!

Having a top 10 position on Google (for a popular phrase) is akin to having your store at the entrance of the biggest shopping mall in history. Being outside the top 50 is more like having a shabby shop on the outskirts of town! Did you know:

• Search Engines are the way in which 90% of people find the resources they need on the internet;
• Google’s share of searches in the UK is over 75% on most measures;
• The Google brand was rated the world’s most powerful in the last annual Millward Brown survey;
• 84% of searchers never make it past the bottom of page two of Google’s results before finding one they like;
• 65% of people never click on paid (or ‘sponsored’) results, preferring one of the ‘organic’ results instead.
  

1. Look before you leap

It is important to understand how Google works - and the size of the task - before you begin. Google itself began life as “Backrub”, a PhD project of two Stanford University graduates. The thesis was that you could ‘rank’ sites on the web in the same way you can judge the authority of a particular academic. In theory, the more times a particular academic is cited by others (for example in a paper) on a topic, and the longer they have been established in their field, the more relevant that academic (and their own work) might be to a researcher of that topic.

Despite its many algorithmic changes, Google retains that essential assumption; Your site will rank well (for a given topic) if it (a) contains good content on that topic which is (b) frequently and naturally linked to by others, for (c) a sustained period of time.

2. Court the Crawl

Search Engines find pages by sending “spiders” (or robots) to “crawl” the web. These are programs which follow a link from one page to another, read the text they find, then follow another link to move on. The spiders bring back the pages they have read and add them to the search engine’s vast index.

Whilst some companies still offer paid submission services, these are essentially obsolete; the big four (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask) and their partners control over 90% of the search market and all decent search engines will find and crawl your site successfully if you (a) have at least one link from another site to yours, and (b) have submitted a list of all your pages (a so-called Site Map file) to them. Find out more at sitemaps.org.

Having all your pages indexed is just the start, however. The most important trick is to ensure the search engine ascribes more weight to your more important pages (normally your home page and product or service category pages).

Google’s weighting system is called “PageRank” and you can find out what your pages score by downloading the Google Toolbar. Think of your site as like a tree, where the homepage is the trunk, your categories the branches and the pages the leaves. To properly court the crawl, your tree should (a) be symmetrical rather than lopsided, and (b) not have too many levels of branches before you get to the leaves. Less is more!

3. Find Phrases that Pay

What do you want to be top on Google for? Many people have ambitions that are too limited. For example, they only want to be top for the name of their business (which is pretty easy for most). The real prize is to attract searchers looking more generally for services that your business offers (i.e. leads rather than prospects).

The key is to thoroughly research (a) the key phrases that people most often use to find what you offer (keyword popularity), and (b) the number of competing pages on Google which also rank for that phrase  (keyword competition). By merging these two data sets, you can identify “phrases that pay”, where the demand is relatively high but the supply of competing choices relatively low; “holes in the market”.

Did you know that whilst “rug” (10,400 daily searches) is more than four times as popular as “carpet” (2,300), it is present in less than half the number of pages? As such, it is far easier to perform well (as a carpet company) for searches on rugs!

You can find the number of competing sites by look at the top right corner of the Google results page. To find which phrases are more popular requires the use of online tools or specialist software and there is more info on my site. 

4. Target the Long Tail

It will perhaps not surprise you that half of all searches on Google are for phrases containing three or more words. After all, “ladies hairdresser Twickenham” is a more useful search than simply “barber”. As the number of words increases, so the frequency of searches falls; something we call “the long tail” in search engine optimisation (SEO) circles. However, the likelihood of conversion (of a click-though to a sale) rises.

For example, if someone tries a very specific “ski chalet Chamonix child care”, they are more likely to book one of the chalets in that set of results than for the results from “ski accommodation france”.

Target this long tail. Ask yourself what the particular strengths of your product or service are and how people might search for this on Google. It is much easier to rank well on a longer phrase (or series of phrases) than a short one - and it will deliver improved conversions. 

5. Prime Your Pages

Most people know about SEO copywriting, the art of writing web pages that read well for the human but are also full of lots of juicy search terms for the search engine spider. What people often do not know is that every part of the web page is consumed by the spider, including the full address of the page (or “URL”). So there is really no excuse to have an http://www.bizname.com/page1.html when you could have both a keyword-rich domain name and a keyword rich set of sub-directories and file names.

The most important blocks of text on your page from an SEO point of view are the page title (contained in the <title> tag), the full URL (as we saw above) and the page headings (contained in the <h1>, <h2>, etc. tags). It never ceases to amaze me, therefore, how many web pages fail to use these elements well.

The full body text of the page (except for very, very long pages) is also crawled, as are the other meta-tags, including the meta-description and meta-keyword tags. However, these later two text blocks carry limited value these days for SEO.

There are three key SEO principles for writing good copy; prominence, proximity and density. Prominence means that text nearer the front of a text block carries more weight. For example, a title of “business printing from Chambers” will rank better for a search on “business printing” than the tile “Chambers: We offer Business Printing”.

Keyword proximity refers to how close the keywords (that make up your key phrase) are to each other. As an example, a page title of “printing business cards & leaflets” will not perform as well as “business card printing & leaflet printing” for a search on either “business card printing” or “leaflet printing”.

Finally, keyword density is the principle most familiar to people. Clearly, “business printing” has a higher density of keywords than “business printing and more”. Remove redundant words!

6. Land the Links

No matter how well copy-written your site is, you will still rank nowhere on Google without inbound links! Remember the principle of “citation” behind the Google algorithm? The most successful academics are not just good in their field! They are also good at promoting their skills with their colleagues, so that them and their research are cited often by their peers.

Ideally, you need links from other sites in (a) quantity, (b) quality and (c) containing the keywords or phrases that you want to be top for. Link quality requires a little explanation; Google judge links that come from long-established and popular sites to carry more weight. There is also some evidence that links from sites with similar content to yours are worth more.

The importance of links (in ranking well) has lead some webmasters to unethical practices, such as paying for keyword-rich links (often on unrelated sites). In many ways, Google is a “digital democracy”, where the sites with the most (quality) votes win the election. Buying votes is, of course, unacceptable (if such a system is to retain validity) so Google have been finding ways to tackle this (including inviting people to “snitch” on their competitors).

More valid ways to build links include directory submissions, forum participation, article submission, online press release publication, and cross-promoting sites with other webmasters (so called “link building”).

7. Pay only for Campaigns

Many businesses use the Google Adwords Programme to pay for positions. This has turned Google into one of the worlds biggest advertising companies! However, a paid advertisement is very much like renting a car. Once you stop the payments, the ads disappear. By contrast, a well-run organic campaign is like buying a car; the investment may be large (particularly in time) but the benefits continue long into the future.

Paid ads work best for the short term campaign; bidding  for “Panasonic TV sale”, with an ad saying “20% off Panasonic TVs”, linked to a campaign landing page about the offer is likely to (a) cost less and (b) convert better than trying to out-bid everyone for “Panasonic TVs” from now to the end of eternity!

8. Get your Business on the Map

In 1992, almost all the most important sites on the web could be captured in one paper directory. In 2008, there are millions of sites on the internet and the web is getting ever more local.

Make sure you have submitted your site to Google Maps and other local search engines. Over the next five years, more and more people will use search engines on their mobile phone to find local services. Be one of them!

9. Continually Tune & Tweak

No webmaster serious about their search ranking should be without two key tools; Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Armed with these tools, you can analyse how people are finding your site, how Google is crawling your pages and how many inbound links you have. A search engine campaign is less a battle are more a war, to be pursued iteratively over a long period of time.

More advanced features help you track the return on investment from paid advertisements and a whole lot more. Do more of what is working well and address poor performance in other areas. Tweak and tune until you get the results you want! 

10. Play the Long Game

Many people are not aware that Google deliberately deflates the value of all links and the value of pages themselves, based on how long they have been in place. This is to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from setting up huge “link farms” of interconnected sites and shooting straight to the top of the rankings overnight.

As such, it will take at least 6 months (and more normally a year) for any new site to rank well or any SEO campaign to fully impact. This simulates the real world, where no academic (or business) that is too new to their topic will be taken seriously by their peers. To rank well requires patience and sustained effort and there is no “quick fix”. Play the long game to achieve lasting success! 

Final Thoughts

Above all, remember that online sales are just a percentage of your total sales and that search engine marketing is just one part of a comprehensive marketing plan. Too many internet entrepreneurs get obsessed about SEO and spend all their waking hours working at it. Get a life and remember you still have a business to run! After all, this is what consultants like me are for!

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