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How to effectively use search engines to promote your website

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

People often underestimate how big a part search engines can play in a website. Despite my best efforts, I often find clients wait until the site is launched and then start asking me about getting traffic from search engines. Other are surprised to find out that some people spend far more on search engine optimisation (SEO) than the design and build of the site itself. It’s a confusing subject to the newcomer so in the post I am to describe how to effectively use search engines to promote your website.

Do you need to rely on search engines?

First of all, search engine traffic is not for everyone. If you work in a highly competitive industry (mortgages or insurance for example) you’d be up against so many other websites you’d be better off exploring other marketing channels. You may also want a website that serves as a reference point and relies on getting traffic from people who are already aware of your business. If you fall into either of these categories you may not need search engines.

Forethought not afterthought

Contrary to popular a site should be built to be search engine friendly at its foundations; it’s not something you ‘plug’ in afterwards. The site’s contents and its structure are often dictated by the keywords you wish to be found under. So let your web designer know as soon as possible about any keywords before they start to design/build the site, not after.

Be careful of content management systems

Content management systems allow those without web design knowledge to update areas of the website yourself. A good content management system will only allow clients to update transient content such as news and events. Letting a client update pages that are meant to be optimised for search engines is never a good idea.

Be patient

Getting results from the search engines is a long term process; your site won’t start appearing on Google immediately. Once your new sites goes up leave all optimised pages as they are for at least three months and monitor their progress. One of the great search engines myths is that Google et al like frequently changing content. A page that changes all the time can make the search engines index the page more regularly but if you keep changing the keywords it will have a negative effect, not a positive one.

Be prepared to spend money to make money

Sometimes to get a really good result you need to spend money to make money. Some SEO campaigns may require you spend thousands per month. This makes people nervous but this is an exercise based on return on investment, not price. If you get a good return the price becomes irrelevant. A £100 per month project that make £50 is more expensive than a £5,000 per month project that makes £50,000.

I always ask clients what their expectations are as to search engines from the outset of the project. My ethos is usually to build the site to be search engine friendly as a matter of good practice (at no extra cost). I then recommend they leave the site for around three months to see how the site hatches out. It’s not uncommon for my clients’ sites to perform well without them spending a penny on search engine traffic. Of course, this approach doesn’t work for highly competitive keywords. Such projects require an ongoing link building campaign; in these cases I collaborate with a Leeds-based search engine company.

If you’d like to use the search engines to promote your website call me now on 07843 483 078 or get a free quote online.

Posted in Business and Money, Internet Marketing, SEO | No Comments »

Why can’t I see my recently launched site in Google?

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I find one of the first things a client will do when their new site goes live is search for it on Google*. People are surprised, however, to find that immediately after their site’s launch the brand new web pages are nowhere to be seen. Why is this?

*Note: throughout this article I am referring to Google rather than search engines in general. This is because Google accounts for the vast majority of search engine traffic and it is far more advanced and sophisticated than any other search engine. My ethos with search engines is optimise for Google and the other, lesser search engines will follow suit.

To understand why this is the case it is first necessary to discuss how search engines work. Search engines are huge indices of web pages. They don’t just store information, however, they also hold information about how different web pages link to one another. When one page links to another, a search engine counts it as a ‘vote’ for that page. All votes are not equal either; a search engine will look at the context of the page (the relevancy of the subject matter) and the quality of the web page (how many pages have already ‘voted’ for that).

When you enter a search term in Google a marvel of modern science actually takes place in the blink of an eye. The search term is sent to Google which then queries an index of billions of web pages. Using a very complex version of the ‘voting’ procedure described above, Google will return a handful of pages it thinks are most relevant to your search. So why am I telling you this?

Well, because of the volume of information searched and the way in which it’s linked together it is not possible to search in realtime. So search engines have special automated programs called ‘spiders’ that ‘crawl’ the web, indexing web pages. The spiders create a copy—or snapshot—of the page periodically. So when you conduct a search on Google, Google is actually searching the snapshot (which is held on its own servers) rather than what’s on your site.

As an aside, Google has actually started returning some results in realtime but generally speaking you can forget about that as it mainly applies to live feeds on high profile news and social networking sites.

This brings us round to the point in question: why can’t I see my recently launched site in Google? Hopefully, you can answer the question yourself now. Google can’t see it because it hasn’t indexed it yet.

How do you get your site to appear? If it’s a brand new site (on a new domain) you can let Google know your site is live but submitting the URL to them. If you’ve used me to build your site I’ll have already done this on your behalf. If you’ve redesigned your site and are relaunching it on a domain already indexed by Google you can just sit back and wait for Google to reindex it.

How long does all this take? I’ll answer that with a question: how long is a piece of string? As a spam prevention mechanism, Google is never too quick to start listing new domains so the important thing is to be patient. It can take weeks or even months. You can speed the process up by getting quality, relevant links to your site. How do you do that? Well, that’s a big topic in its own right and perhaps I’ll tackle that another time…

I hope that sheds some light on the matter. If you need help getting your website on Google call me on 07843 483 078 or get a free quote online.

Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO, Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »

When is the next PageRank update?

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Budding search engine optimisers believe that getting a high Google PageRank solves all their organic SEPR problems. Forums, and blogs are rife with the the question, when is the next PageRank update? Although PageRank is something all webmasters should be aware of this article aims to put PageRank and its update into perspective.

PageRank is a numerical value between zero and ten that Google place on each web page. The number equates to how important Google views that particular page, zero being of no importance at all and ten being the highest possible importance. PageRank for any web page can be accessed through various websites and perhaps most commonly through the Google toolbar. PageRank is important but here are some points to bear in mind:

We see different PageRank data to Google

We see an update to Google PageRank approximately every three months. The most common misconception is that Google always sees the same PageRank data that we do –- it doesn’t! Google does this periodic export so we get an idea of how websites are performing; Google is constantly updating its PageRank. Any good blogger will know that if they write a good post you can see it achieve top rankings within 48 hours. If Google waited three months to apply importance on new web pages we would never see fresh content returned in our search results.

Remember it’s PageRank, not SiteRank

Another fallacy is that PageRank is site-wide. For example, if your home page has a PageRank of five then so do all your other pages. It’s incredible how many people are under this illusion considering the names of the technology: PageRank. A lot of webmasters spend time building links to their home page to get a higher PageRank, which is a good idea, but sometimes they tend to neglect other pages (sometime those with their best content on).

Context. Context. Context

Google places huge importance of the context and the relevancy of searches. It’s easy to see the evidence of this; sites with PageRank of nine and ten like BBC, Yahoo and Blogger do not appear in every search we carry out as they would do if Google solely used PageRank as criteria for web page import. So before you start beating yourself up for not having a PageRank of ten look at the keywords on your website. A page with a rank of two will always beat one with a PageRank of ten if it is more relevant.

Quality not quantity

Links from other sites to your web pages are the main contributing factor to PageRank. Each link is like a vote for your web page but not everyone’s vote is the same. The more popular a web page (i.e. higher PageRank) the more importance is placed on your web page. And again context is important, build links that are relevant to your site. Such techniques will update your PageRank much quicker than you think, Google can see the update even though you can’t.

You may read this article and ask, is there any way at all I can check my progress? There is: visit Google Rankings. Here you can enter keywords and a URL, the website then checks with Google and tells you where you appear for a particular search (if at all). This is much more reliable than a PageRank lookup as it looks at where Google places your web page there and then!

Although PageRank is important we shouldn’t agonise over when the next update is. It’s a useful benchmark to see how our site is progressing but we can spend our time doing much more useful things to get our web pages to appear in Google.

For more help call me on 07843 483 078 or get a free quote now!

Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO | No Comments »