SEO - The First Step

SEO or Search Engine Optimization means working on a website to improve its ranking in searches. There are numerous components of SEO, from using the right text for a particular web page to laying out the website so that the search engine bots (programs that "read" web pages) identify your business, product or service correctly.

The first step in SEO, though, is always deciding what term or terms you think customers will use when searching. I strongly suggest that you not rely on your thoughts (or mine) alone. None of us uses the same words for every situation or thing.

Think about how people across the country refer to soft drinks: soda, pop, soda pop, soft drink, or if you're like me, it's Coke® (no matter what you're drinking).

So even though you may think you sell widgets, the rest of the world may call your product thingamajigs or whatchamacallits How do you handle that so you rank well for all 3 variations? Ideally, you have enough pages on your website that you can have one emphasize "widgets" while another emphasizes "whatchamacallits" and so forth. If not - and you don't want to add new pages to your site, you should emphasize the most commonly used word (there are ways to determine that) and simply mention the other words where you can.

I'll continue this mini-education on SEO next week, but here are three things to remember.

1. Don't try to make your home page rank well for every product/service you offer or every term you can think of.
2. Probably half your visitors don't enter your site via the home page.
3. Google and other search engines do not share how they rank websites. They give guidelines but they don't share their trade secrets. Successful SEO is equal parts intuition, experience and following the guidelines.

My experience (a few examples)*:

• Search for "Dallas wedding venue" #5 is my client:
  (The Lawton Estate)
• Search for "wedding coordinators Austin" #2 is my client:
  (Belynda Barkley Montgomery Weddings)
• Search for "letter plaques" #1 is my client:
  (Marie Ricci Collection)
• Search for "children's name plaques" #2 is my client
  (for Mercy's sake, inc. Children's Furniture)
• Search for "gourmet cooking class texas" #1 is my client
  (The Pan Handle Gourmet Cooking Tools)
  

*These were the results today. That's another thing to remember about search engine results. Results change. New sites come online, old sites go away, sites get redesigned, etc.
That's why, if you're serious about staying in the top 10, you should either be spending a few hours every month working on it or pay someone to do it for you.

Happy Memorial Day.

SEO vs. Goliath

Search engine optimization (SEO) is more art than science I think. I started learning about it before I even built my first website - because I knew the primary goal of the site was to get found. Only then could the primary goal of the business - to sell things - be accomplished.

For ten years that site has ranked in the top 5 for at least 20 terms that we considered important. The site went through numerous design changes, but we always stayed true to what search engines supposedly consider important, i.e. text links, good meta titles, and descriptive content about the products on each page.

This spring we learned that doing the right thing doesn't mean diddly squat if it doesn't work. For no reason that we can determine, Google suddenly started picking up the website's alias instead of its primary domain name.

Now, mind you, there was no duplicate site. In 2002, a magazine featuring one of the products gave the wrong URL, so we quickly bought that URL (very similar to the correct URL) and pointed it to our website.

Why, in March, Google started indexing the aliased site we don't know. But it seems that they dumped the "real" domain name from their database and started using the aliased one. And since almost no other websites link to the aliased domain, it doesn't have a good Popularity Ranking and, thus, those pages don't rank well.

Visitors from Google dropped half in March as compared to the previous 3 months. They dropped almost half again in April and have stayed at 25% of what's normal. Since the site sells high-end products, it takes a lot of visitors to generate sales.

We've done everything recommended by various experts to try to rectify the situation, but the end result is that Google has all the power and we have to wait until their bots crawl every page (which they're slowly doing finally) and our site should return to where it was in the next month or three.

The moral of the story is not that you shouldn't have aliases for your domain. Sometimes, as in this case, there is a valid reason for having more than one name for a website.

The moral is that no matter how hard you work at something, you can't always control the outcome. And businesses should be prepared for what, in this case, turned out to be a real "business interruption." Unfortunately, even if the company had business interruption insurance, I doubt there's a policy that would have covered this situation. Imagine trying to prove to an insurance company that the webmaster didn't do something to the site - however inadvertently - that caused the drop in ranking or exclusion from the database.

So, save your money for the hard times.