Knowledge base

Black art or weird science? We look at the issue of website optimisation and offer some practical advice on enhancing your online presence.

Search engines are a mystical and ever changing beast. Most commonly, search engine optimisers will spend countless hours worrying about how to crack a search engine algorithm – especially the real dragon that is Google. “If I could only crack Google’s algorithm, my site would be at number one every time anyone searched for legal help”

However, this way of thinking may be completely flawed. Here are some suggestions:

1. The guys at Google, those munchkins of mathematics and formulae are constantly tuning the algorithms they use (and there are many) to keep one step ahead of you. If you try to ‘trick’ Google you may have success one day – and total failure the next. You may even get sand-boxed or blacklisted for your efforts when the dragon bites back.

2. While you are spending time, money and resources on trying to impress Google, Yahoo and the MSN, - your competitors may be spending the same amount of effort on impressing your customers. Think about it – Search engines are not your customers and have never bought a bean from you. It would be a far better use of your resources to concentrate on making your web pages perform for your customers.

3. If you are spending a huge amount of time trying to get top ‘organic’ rankings – you are probably only concentrating on a handful of elements on your site that will have any effect. There are literally hundreds of ‘essential’ things that you could do to your site to make it look perfect to Google and other search engines – but what would the site look like to humans? If one thing is certain, a site that is designed for search engine effectiveness does nothing to win over your customers.
So, why not try a cleaner and more elegant approach…

We all want great rankings that will directly equate to customer interactions, new business and eventually sales. It is really the customer sales we are seeking from our sites – not just visitors or rankings.

Here are the five keys to good rankings without tilting at windmills….

1. Customer Experience is the most critical factor in getting real returns from your website. Write your web page content for your customers. Don’t try to impress the search engines at all – because they are not your target audience and they will never become your customer.

2. Use education and research to influence the changes you make to your website pages. Don’t believe the theory or fantasy – concentrate on the facts. Your website could be badly affected and you can waste huge amounts of time following the latest guru’s thinking.

3. Always remember the basics of search engine optimisation. Maintain key phrases that mean something to your customers within your page titles, body text, text links, meta data and site maps. This way, when Google tunes it’s algorithm to defeat the would be dragon slayers – your pages won’t need amending at all.

4. Each page should have its own keyword phrase or tag, and each page should focus on one keyword only. Keep it really focussed and don’t include tags from other pages or content.

5. Remember to use as many real marketing techniques as possible to drive relevant customers to your site. You may get fewer visitors – but the quality of the returns is likely to bring far higher rewards.

In conclusion...
Use research to steer your website optimisation and gain a better understanding of your customers’ expectations and experiences. Base any changes to your page content and code on the facts that research can bring, rather than fantasy, speculation or theory.

By building your pages to suit your customers, you will have far greater success from fewer hits than by driving irrelevant traffic in droves to pages that don’t inspire – and ultimately risk being killed off by the major search engines.

About The Author
David Jerram is the principal of Jerram Marketing and Design, a web and brand design agency that specialises in customer interaction and experience through website marketing. You can contact David by emailing david@jerram.co.uk.
www.jerram.co.uk

Published on: 25-09-2006