Who was it that said “if you build it they will come” because it’s not true online. How many websites have failed because the person assumed that visitors would just magically appear, I met with a business person recently who had spent many thousands of dollars on an eCommerce website that had, over the course of many months, sold nothing at all. Building a website without search engine optimization is like putting a retail store at the end of a dark alley and then wondering where all the customers are. If you put that same store in a major shopping mall, thousands of people would begin coming through that store every day simple because of its location. Search engines are that shopping mall and search engine optimization is the way to get your business located there. Many business are recognizing how great search engine optimization is, which is illustrated by the growth in the field in the last few years.
While there are many business offering search engine optimization, you need to be careful because some are offering substandard service, either they don’t really know what they’re doing and taking peoples money, or they are engaged in “black hat” methods, that is those techniques that are considered unethical and could result in a site being banned by search engines.
So what goes into effective “white hat” search engine optimization? It used to be about meta tags a few years back, hidden tags in the header section of a page’s HTML that told a search engine what that page was about. Thanks to people abusing meta tags, they are not used by most search engines today, you will still want to have them, but the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) will not use them to determine your rank. The most important thing you can do to improve your search engine rank today is to develop inbound links. An inbound link is a link to your website from another site not in your domain. The number of links to your site tell search engines how relevant your website is, the higher the PageRank of the site linking to you, the more that link counts for. There are a lot of other things that will improve your site’s standing in the search engines like using carefully researched keywords and the use of those keywords in the headings, subheadings, title and body of your page, still the most important thing is having lots of inbound links.
How do you go about getting inbound links? There are lots of places online where you can buy links, be careful if you choose this option that the website you are buying the link on has a decent PageRank itself, otherwise it may not be worth what you’re paying for it. There are also opportunities for reciprocal links (you link to me and I’ll link to you), but some search engines are now recognizing reciprocal links and giving them less weight when determining a website’s relevance. The best way to develop lots of good inbound links is still the old fashioned way, develop great content on your website that will make people want to visit your site and link to it.
At this point it’s obvious there’s quite a bit of time and/or money involved in getting a website search engine optimized, researching keywords, building those keywords into the content and the meta tags, developing inbound links, not to mention making sure the code is clean and properly formatted so the search engines will not have any trouble reading it. What can you expect to see for all this? First of all let’s make some assumptions about your website’s conversion rate. A conversion rate is the ratio of the number of visitors who take a desired action (fill out a form, make a purchase, etc.) to the number of visitors who view the page. The average conversion rate for many websites is around 4%, if your website sells widgets and has a conversion rate of 4% you will get 4 new customers for every 100 visitors to your website. I can see that the search term “widget” got 23,867 searches last month (September 2006), If you could get in the top ten results for that term and capture even a tenth of those searchers you would have 2,387 visitors a month which would result in 95 widget sales. Obviously the cost of search engine optimization is minimal compared to its potential to make money.
With these kinds of returns you can see why SEO is something that should not be an afterthought for a website but something that is built in right from the start.
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