SEO | Search Engine Positioning

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Search Engine Optimization, though an integral part of developing a complete web presence, is something that’s often overlooked by both web design companies and their clients alike. This article is meant to serve as an introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it will be followed with a 2nd article which contains a basic primer on how to go about properly optimizing a site. My intended audience for this first article is the savvy consumer who is trying to educate himself or herself, and the follow-up article will endeavor to help those design/development firms who are only just breaking into the world of SEO.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing a site’s ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Ideally, you want your business to appear as the first result to someone who is searching for a product or service you provide to your customers. For example, if you own a vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia, it would significantly increase your restaurant’s exposure if your website were the first result for “vegetarian restaurant Philadelphia” on Google. This type of positioning is the goal of search engine optimization.

Organic Results vs. Paid Results

It is important to understand the difference between organic search results and paid search results. Organic search results are selected and positioned by the search engine itself, with no external bias toward one site over another. With organic searching, the order of results is determined exclusively by the relevance of the site to the user’s specific query, as determined by the search engine’s internal algorithms. Search engine optimization endeavors to “educate” the search engine about a site so that the site will be seen as relevant for certain queries, and therefore given better positioning in the results. This “most relevant site first” method of ordering search results is in sharp contrast to pay-per-click, in which the highest bidder for a given search query is given preference. However, pay-per-click results are generally shown on separate parts of the screen from the main organic results, usually at the top of the window or in a sidebar labeled “sponsored links”. Although there are compelling reasons to launch a pay-per-click campaign as part of your online marketing plan, this article focuses exclusively on organic search optimization.

Won’t the search engines just find my site on their own?

Modern search engines are very adept at crawling the web and creating a comprehensive index that contains every website they come across. However, the algorithms used by search engines take into account many different factors when determining where to position a site, and if your site doesn’t measure up when it comes to some of the more important factors, you will end up buried among thousands or millions of other sites.

Search engines have one goal: to return the most relevant results to a user’s query in order to help them find what they are looking for. Why is it, then, that if you do in fact own a vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia, your website can still get buried on page 29 for the exact query “vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia”? One reason for this apparent discrepancy is that search engines don’t view websites the way a person does. When a search engine downloads a web page, it sees only the markup code that was used to create the site – it doesn’t see visual elements like graphics or page layout. If the site hasn’t been optimized, more often than not, the search engine’s back-end view of the site offers little indication of what content is important and what the primary focus of the site is. These search engine “spiders” – the algorithms that do the actual searching and indexing – can make a good guess as to what the site is about, but without a clear understanding of why it would be a great result for a specific search query, the site will end up in a mediocre position at best.

Another reason sites receive a poor ranking is that they simply don’t appear to be very important to the grand scheme of the Internet. Search engines are trying to return the most useful results to their users, so if your content appears to be of little value, and if no other sites on the web are linking back to yours, your site is going to be very poorly positioned. One way to combat this problem is to work to build inbound links, which are links to your site from other sites. This can be accomplished by submitting your site to online directories, participating in forum discussions or blog discussions relevant to your site and including a link back, or by marketing the site via press releases or external product reviews (where applicable). Inbound links, however, aren’t the whole story, and it takes a comprehensive SEO plan to ensure long term, first page positioning, especially in competitive markets.

Why didn’t my web designer optimize my site when he built it?

There is a common misconception that search optimization is simply a matter of altering the design of the site or adding a few keywords to the content, and that such SEO-related tasks should be handled by the web designer prior to the site launch. While it’s true that there are design elements that need to be addressed when optimizing a site, SEO is, in many ways, a marketing effort rather than a technical one. The optimization process involves tasks such as copywriting and press release distribution, which fall well outside the technical realm of web development. In the end, SEO is an entirely separate product and process from the actual web design, and it needs to be treated (and budgeted) as such.

Recall what I said earlier regarding search engines evaluating the overall importance of your site in order to determine its search positioning. Much like a print campaign or TV ad, your goal on the web is to increase brand awareness, because it gives a sense of stability and competitive importance to your company, and it creates a connection between the company and your customers. The idea of brand awareness is well understood and sought after in the marketing world, but it often becomes diluted when crossing over to the web, sometimes to the point of being tacked on as an afterthought to the development of a company website. SEO should, conversely, be considered an integral part of any marketing plan, and should be budgeted and managed separately from web design and development.

Who can optimize my site?

In the world of SEO, it’s very easy to find companies who are essentially selling snake oil. Oftentimes, these companies offer little more than “directory submission”, which, while it is a piece of the SEO puzzle when done correctly, may not affect your positioning at all when done incorrectly (in some cases, it can actually hurt your positioning).  Choosing the right SEO firm can be tricky, but Google has a page dedicated to the most important things to consider when choosing an SEO company. You can find that page here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

To add to what Google has suggested on that page, it’s important that the SEO firm you choose offers a plan that is tailored specifically for your website. If their plan seems instead to consist of generic link building and indiscriminate directory submission, it’s likely that you won’t see the kind of results you would ideally expect (if you see any results at all). The SEO company should take the time to detail individual changes to each page of your site, and should suggest new pages to be added. Additionally, any good SEO firm will be able to not only provide analytics and metrics, but will also be able to explain the data’s significance within the context of your specific website.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization should be considered an integral part of developing your company’s web presence, but it’s important to remember that SEO effectively crosses the boundary between technical process and marketing endeavor, so it needs to be managed and budgeted as an independent project, rather than being tacked on as part of the general site design. If your web development company doesn’t offer comprehensive and developed SEO services, it is important to hire a separate SEO firm and facilitate ongoing cooperation between the two companies.

Many sites on the web are amazing – a real tribute to their designers. Many of these are attractive, functional and compelling for visitors. But look a little deeper and we see a consistent problem with search engine ranking possibilities across many sites. The snazzy site’s creators are good at their job. Their job is site creation. They also generally think they understand site prioritisation but screw up their clients SEO such that the search engine optimisation effort is multiplied through re-work and necessary architectural changes. The main issues are URL manipulation, duplicate content and a serious downside of popular shopping cart software products. Related issues are potentially endless, particularly with future site changes/overhauls and their abandoned URL’s that have desirable search engine clout.

The Cause Leading to the Effect.
Since people in business generally have a skill base that doesn’t include web site design, they dip into the sizable pool of inexpensive web creator talent around. They’ve heard of SEO, but their chosen web design company who produce dazzling samples of work along with shopping carts say they will create the site in line with SEO principles. Great! Once producing a great looking site that works superbly, works with the shopping cart, demonstrably has customers going through the shopping cart and parting with their funds, has products easy to add and subtract through an external interface with the database – the customer is pleased and pays the bill after agreeing the ongoing fee structure with amendments and changes. And start a PPC campaign. And realise that the cost of the PPC campaign is about the same as their premises rental at their high street but with a huge cost increase at Christmas time. And realise that now they have two landlords – their High St premises owner and Google (and/or Yahoo, MSN, etc…). Or, they realise that whilst they thought that with their new online companythe web would be free, they, like their real estate counterparts, have an expensive landlord of the search masters, led by the ‘benevolent’ Google. But no matter – just have to wait a while until the organic results show their site highly through the efforts of those clever people that created this great site – just wait a few weeks… months… years. Here’s why it’s going to be years… decades… never. And here’s how to make it, realistically, a few months.

Unfriendly URL.
The URL problem is not limited to the use of shopping cart software like OS Commerce and others that make use of session ID’s, although they are default offenders. Some web design companies compound the problem with the use of session ID’s apart from their shopping cart software, or use ‘cart created’ session ID’s throughout their design. Session ID’s are a handy means of keeping state and identity across several pages for a particular user’s sequence of pages within the domain per session. The main fully featuredshopping cart – OS Commerce – which is free and hence attractive – appends a session ID to every page. The ID is unique to every user session (so if the user closes the browser and re-starts a session on a site the ID will be different). See an example of this with naturalfigures(dot)co(dot)uk. Go to any category and see the session ID appended. Now close the browser and open the same URL again – note that the session ID has changed for the same pages selected. What’s the problem with this? When the Google bot or any other SE’s bot comes along to examine the page – it sees the page with appended session ID and indexes the page. Then the next time it visits the page it lands on the same page and sees the same content, but this time for a different apparent URL – which is the same URL with a different session ID appended. What’s this? Duplicate content! Most web designers have little understanding of why this would ever be a problem.

A similar issue of duplicate content exists with the way that most web designers have internal links to some start file like index.htm. Back to the home page? Go to thedomain/index.htm. But this is the same content as thedomain.com. But there‘s more. Not only are these pages the same, but also http://thedomain and http://www.thedomain are also the same content. To demonstrate the SE’s viewing this as different, try it with xe(dot)com and note the different PageRank scores. It’s easy to fix these problems, it’s just that webdesigners are generally oblivious to the problem.

Site Redesigns, Wasted Pages.
Occasionally, like your living room, the site needs an overhaul. Or it could be that some web designer believes that the way to higher ranking for their client is to redesign the site because they’ve heard that page names should have hyphens, not underscores, or that page names shouldn’t have hyphens but should have underscores (it doesn’t matter a hoot). In the redesign – many webdesigners destroy any search engine clout currently enjoyed and end up with a negative affect for the site. Oh well. At least it looks much nicer after the redesign.

What are web designers missing?
As SE’s traverse a page they analyse it and index it assuming it doesn’t offend them in some way (cloaking, dup content, redirects defined in the wrong way, etc.). It’s indexed. Got that? Indexed. That is, the page – referred to by its URL – now exists in some database patrolled by Google’s armed guards. When webdesigners change a site design and invent new page names without properly redirecting from the old page, Google see another shiny new page – note that it has exactly the same content as another on the same domain they already have indexed – and index the new page too. Only now the site is devalued in the eyes ofthe search engine because it clearly duplicates content. This is not anywhere near as serious as duplicate content across distinct domains, but is still a red flag when seen within a domain. But wait – it’s not duplicate content! The old page has been changed – sure – it still exists because there may be external links to it – but there are no internal links to the page – it’s been replaced by the new page. But did anyone tell Google about that? What?! How do you tell Google about anything? By a properly defined 301 redirect in the htaccess file. Hmmm. Try that on your web designer – if there’s the slightest questioning lift of eyebrows – run. But the problem doesn’t end there; since this is now a new page, it doesn’t have the establishment of the old page. The SE doesn’t know it’s a replacement, it just thinks it’s a new page, something that has to earn it’s place through time and new internal and external links. The htaccess 301 redirect resolves all this.

The Solution.
A popular web presence is no longer the breeze it used to be. Everyone flocks to the web – but how do the SE’s sort out the wheat from the chaff? The solution to this and much more is the design of pages from the start with SEO principles in mind. But this has become a buzz-phrase.The web designers need to understand how search engines see pages as well as how humans see pages. Let’s face it – if SEO’s designed all the web sites it wouldn’t be pretty. Both skills are needed. For proof of this see the site cited in the bio box for this article – as site which to prove an SEO point is distinctively un-pretty. But the SEO’s have the upper hand. They know they aren’tdesigners and they know they need clever artistic designers to build something that is not just functional but also attractive. The converse is not generally true. Web designers in general don’t really understand http://www.turnerdow.com’>search engine optimisation – despite their sales people’s sale oriented claims. They think they know the SEO science.

We’ve yet to find a web designer who does.