search engine positioning UK

A recent survey by ActiveMedia research found that search engine positioning was rated the most important web site promotional method by web site owners. This continues the trends first identified by WebCMO. The WebCMO study also noted that search engines were the most favoured method for driving traffic to a web site. The results of the ActiveMedia research survey are as follows:-

Search engine positioning	66%
E-mail	54%
Print brochures	42%
Print catalogues	40%
Trade shows	37%

It should be noted that "search engine submission" i.e. mass registration with numerous search engines was not regarded as the most effective technique. That's because successful web site owners know that submitting alone will not get you significant traffic despite the false propaganda repeated by Web designers and in the press.

The participants of the survey understood that submitting to 100's of search engines (which is very easily achieved using multiple submission packages) will not drive appropriate traffic to your site. It is your selection of appropriate words and word combinations, and the way they are positioned to give a good ranking in the major search engines that will reap the greatest rewards.

Find the Right Keywords

This matter needs great attention. Choosing the right key words is absolutely crucial to your success with the search engines.

We recently heard the story of someone who obtained a top 10 position in a major search engine but they became rapidly disappointed when just a few people visited the site - they had chosen unpopular words and phrases. Moreover it's not just a question of selecting key words or phrases that many people are searching on - more importantly are they likely to be potential customers for your products. The question to ask yourself is how can you find out the key words that your potential customers are looking for? Here you might need the help of a professional Internet Marketing firm like Allery Scotts who will research customers to find the right words and compare them with those used within different target markets. For example words used in the UK might be quite different to those used in the United States. What our researchers are trying to do is get themselves into the shoes of your customers and then find techniques to brainstorm for appropriate words. Another source of good ideas is to look at the key words your competitors are targeting. It is very important to organise and focus the key words into short phrases etc. However an important aspect of this work is to actually find out how often people search for those particular words. Use statistics (where you can get hold of them) from one of the main search engines. Stop guessing and find out the actual number of times the key word/phrase are queried. So to summarise:-

Research and brainstorm the general words and phrases which apply in your industry.
Conduct an extensive search on those words and then visit the competing sites. View the HTML source code and observe the key words used by your competitors' sites. By this time you should be finding a variety of key words you haven't considered before. Of course this does not mean that they are best key words to target, but it can help you in your brainstorming process. It is important to make sure you adopt words and phrases that specifically apply to your business. You don't want to be including key words that will not bring you high quality leads.
At this stage start to take some of the guessing out of the process and gain access to a search engine where you can quantify the frequency of individual key word searches.

Go for the Soft Spots

What we have done up to now is try to get some indication of the "demand" for particular search words. What we also need is an indication of how many sites are competing for those key words. For example, ranking well on the single word "furniture" will be much more difficult than ranking in the top ten for "windsor chairs". For those of you who have a mathematical bent you will realise that single key words will naturally return the least targeted leads. If someone is searching for just "furniture" are they looking for bedroom furniture, kitchen furniture, door furniture. You see the point.

The best thing to do is to target multi word phrases that give you the highest quality leads. For example, if you sell software you don't want to waste your efforts trying to rank number one on the word "software". It is just too general - not to mention too competitive. The easiest road to success is to target popular key words that your competitors have overlooked. What we are trying to find are those areas where we know there is appropriate traffic searching within the search engines but a minimal degree of competition for those phrases. In other words we are looking for the soft spots. It is thought that the majority of web site owners are targeting the wrong key words. Why do we suspect this? Easy - we look at their computer code and compare it with the words we know are being searched within the search engines. If you put in the resources to target the right key words in areas where there is minimal competition, you will probably be ahead of 99% of the world and you will be generating more traffic (and better targeted) with less effort.

Making words "Visible" to the Search Engines

Once you have the right words and phrases, how do you make them visible (and attractive) to search engines? Again we have found much misinformation from the press and web designers alike. By filling in the home page Meta tags and notifying the search engines, the Site is likely to be listed under those words. However, the mathematics dictate that the ranking is likely to be so low as to be meaningless.

The tricks and tools for interacting with search services are too numerous to list here. Perhaps the best advice is to design each page with searching in mind and to monitor your site statistics to see which pages are working best - then keep reviewing each page to include more meaningful content.