Help People Find your Web Site

Search Engine Optimization: The Basics--Part I

NoSpin Marketing

NoSpin Debunker #61: February 24, 2003

 

 

New NoSpin Poll for February 24, 2003

 

You’re sitting at your desk and quickly need some information. Where do you go to find it? Take the new 5-second, NoSpin Poll.

 

Search Engine Optimization: The Basics—Part I

 

Why have a web site unless potential visitors know how to find your company’s type of expertise, products, and services? Good question, but less than 10% of businesses do even the basics to facilitate visitors finding them on the Internet.

 

Before your eyes glaze over with the term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO for short), let me assure you that 1) SEO is an important marketing/business function (and not a technical one) and 2) I’m going to stick to the basics of SEO in the next several Debunkers (but I will also refer you to some excellent, additional sources if you want to learn more). And if you listen, you will not be sorry. I’m synthesizing what I’ve learned with clients and researched over the past year.

 

Search Engine Optimization includes a host of things that you can actively do ensure that people who use search engines can better find your web site url’s on the World Wide Web. It’s become a marketing sub-specialty unto itself--and is critical if you have an Information Commerce site (that provides high quality information and attempts to collect information in return) or e-Commerce web site (actually sells products and services, directly, online). 

 

The NoSpin SEO Quiz

 

Part I of this series is the NoSpin SEO Quiz—to rate your knowledge of basic SEO techniques—and give you some initial clues how to facilitate business surfers to find your site. Are you competent handling the basics of SEO marketing? Or are you clueless? There is not much in between. Now don’t peek until you answer each of the 10 True/False questions below:

 

  1. Our web site starts with a Flash introduction before the homepage appears (even if there is an option to turn it off)? True or False
  2. We know what our top “key words” are (that is, the short 2-4 word phrases that people actually type into search engines to find your type of expertise, products, and services). True or False
  3. Our company name is the Number One search term used to find our web site. True or False
  4. My company’s name appears as the first and/or only <title tag> on my homepage and other urls (that is, my company name is what appears in the blue bar at the very top of your browser and what is automatically bookmarked is your company name). True or False
  5. We have consciously included our top key words into the (non-graphical) content near the top of our web site pages  (and not just our homepage). True or False
  6. We put dozens of “key words” into our “meta” descriptions and key word tags to make sure that search engines find us. True or False
  7. Since our company (name) ranks first on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. we’re doing great with our search engine optimization. True or False
  8. My site contains relatively few links to external sites (or internal links). True or False
  9. Our site is listed in The Open Directory Project. True or False
  10. We’ve done the “submit our site to a gazillion search engines” and so we’re set as far as search engine optimization. True or False

 

NoSpin SEO Quiz Answers

 

Note that any answers of “Do Not Know” above, automatically put you in the Clueless category. Sorry, that’s just the NoSpin truth.

 

1.      If you answered True, you are truly clueless about SEO and web sites in general. At this point, top search engines don’t read Flash (besides the fact the most business people think that Flash intros are obnoxious), and so you are ensuring that your lead page is invisible. Not a good thing if you’re planning on visitors.

2.      If you answered True, you’re correct but still clueless if you (think you know what they are and) have not used Overture’s search suggestion tool and bid tool to analyze key word options and rankings. It’s perhaps the best “free” market research tool on the WWW today. Do it today, and there will be more on key words next Debunker. See the Term Suggestion Took and View Bid Tools at  http://www.overture.com/d/USm/adcenter/tools/index.jhtml.

3.      If you answered True, you’re clueless (unless you work for a huge company that has an international brand name or work for a business wherein your “brand” is exceptionally well known in your target market). Of course, you wouldn’t know this in the first place unless you have a web traffic monitoring tool that you regularly use to monitor our web site traffic (per page), key word use, search engine and url sources, etc. If you don’t have and use such a tool (http://www.sitestats.com/ is a good inexpensive one)—again, you are clueless. Think about it. The huge majority of folks that you may want to visit your site don’t necessarily know your company name (or url). You want business surfers to find you through the “key words” they type into a browser and not necessarily your company name.

4.      If you answered True, you’re clueless. What appears between the <title>…<title> tags (in your html code) is not important so much because that is what appears at the top blue bar of your browser and what gets automatically bookmarked. Rather the words in your <title> tags are more important to most search engines in finding and indexing your site—often by a factor of 5 to 10—than any other words on your pages.  PS—you can view your source code (or any other site’s) by using the View/Source Code on your browser.

5.      If you answered False, you’re clueless. What you actually use in the content of your site (that is, in the actual html code vs. Flash or other graphics files) is also very, very important to all top search engines that “read” your content in context. Their automated crawlers or spiders also read from left to right and emphasize the top 150 words or so of your pages.

6.      If you answered True, you’re clueless. But you’d always heard that meta tags are critical to SEO? Nope, not much any more. Search engines have wised up. You can still put them in because some engines will take a look (at a several dozen words, maybe), but meta tags rate as relatively low level criteria for most sophisticated engines.

7.      If you answered True, you’re clueless. It’s pretty much a given that your company (name) should rank first or very high if you have a good company name and url (which many companies do not). But it’s much more important (again unless you are truly a big worldwide “brand”) how you rank on your top key words versus your company name.

8.      If you answered True, you’re clueless. Lots of folks mistakenly think that they should not have links to external sites because then visitors will just leave, and they don’t see the point of internal links either. If you don’t have external links within your site, then it’s highly unlikely other sites link to yours. Link popularity (the number of other sites that link to you and their traffic volume) has become one of THE top criteria to rank and place sites on search engines. Google pioneered this and others have followed. To get placed higher on Google and other engines, you need your link other sites, and you need to reciprocate. Internal links not only help give visitor multiple ways to traverse your site, but also help spiders hit your multiple urls.

9.      If you answered False, you’re clueless. The Open Directory Project is THE most important free submission that you can make to a search engine/directory. It becomes the basis for Google’s Directory (different from Google’s overall search) but is used by lots of top engines for listing information—and it’s free. Your site must be in this human-edited directory.

10. If you answered True, you are clueless. Automated services often are complete hoaxes that focus only on the mini-player search engines. It’s OK to be listed on those, but 90%+ of the action is on the big engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and 10-15 others where you need to be very careful how you submit (most require fees) your urls, titles and descriptions (e.g. many of those actually penalize automated submissions). If that email promising to get you placed on the first page of Google sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true (or it’s a trick that can get you into large trouble).

   

Get more SEO clues in the next several Debunkers

 

If you missed even a single correct answer to the questions above, you are pretty clueless about what it takes to get people to your web site. But take heart in that “clueless” is not the same as “hopeless”—or least we can hope--if you are ready to learn. And note also that most so-called web site designers don’t know even the basics of search engine optimization and would fail the above test. They should be banned from developing web sites of any type.

 

In fact, give this test to your internal or external web site designer, and if he/she cannot answer all questions correctly, find a new designer--and get someone who at least knows the basics. It’s virtual malpractice for designers not to follow at least the basics of search engine optimization.

 

There is a lot more to search engine optimization, but you can’t go wrong starting with the basics. The key to search engine optimization starts with key words, which will be the topic of the next Debunker. Then we’ll talk about how and where to submit your listings, pay-per-click, link popularity, tricks (that you should avoid) and other basics of search engine optimization—so that you can get a lot more prospects to your web site.

 

Also please let me know what YOU think about this debunker! And please add these unconventional business professionals to the Debunker mailing list.

 

If you would prefer to be removed from this email list, let me know.

 

Tom Ranseen                           NoSpin Marketing                             615.383.7157