Tales from the Techside

SEO & SEM

SEO & SEM. Sounds like a college conference football championship. In reality it is an important question to ask yourself as you examine your online footprint. SEO is of course short for ‘Search Engine Optimization,’ while SEM stands for ‘Search Engine Marketing.’ While they are not necessarily at odds - you can and perhaps should do both - they are two completely different strategies to maximize your Retrun On Investment online. I will deal with SEO in this segment, and hope to post the second portion shortly.

SEO is nothing new. Since the inception of the online search, the goal has always been to be that first result on the page. All sorts of techniques have been developed over time to try to achieve that vaunted goal. Of course, search engines have changed their algorithms in response to some of the less savory of these tactics. Most search engines today have followed the now familiar googlesque model of using several factors to gauge ‘where’ your search result lands. Often these algorithms are as complex as they are secretive. What is clear is that on a genuine search engine you cannot ‘buy’ placement, unless it is through some of the hard work detailed in this blog. Of course you can ‘buy clicks,’ but we will get to that when we discuss SEM.

So - you have a website. On that site you have some content that you think is relevant to your target audience. How do help them to find you? What can you do to optimize your ’searchability?’

First, understand that while you are not paying for clicks in this model, it is NOT free. There is time and effort involved, and unfortunately the effort does not ever really end, although it does get easier over time.

Second, know your audience. Understanding your target audience, and their traffic patterns is an important part of SEO and SEM . If you don’t know where they go to search, and how they search for information, you are flying blind.

Third, assess where you are starting from. If you have just launched your site, this is easy, you are virtually invisible online. Traffic won’t ’stumble upon’ you (ok, with deference to stumbleupon.com, it is certainly possible that they might, but hardly likely). If you have an developing or mature online presence, ask yourself what you know about its usage and searchability. What is your google page rank? If you have the google toolbar it will tell you, but understand that the toolbar does not report in real time but uses a cached page rank to display your rating. Most REALTOR websites that I have seen are a google page rank of 0 or 1. That is not good on a 10 pt scale from 1-10 where ten is best.

There are several online sources to check your pagerank, including checkpagerank.com. Understand that your page rank will change over time, possibly daily, based off of factors in the google algorithm. In turn, this algorithm may itself change over time. What is your daily traffic level? DO NOT reference ‘Hits’ as an important metric to anyone, it doesn’t represent anything meaningful.

A hit is simply a call against an element of a webpage. I can craft a page to deliver a great number of hits with a single load. I can thus easily have a site that gets very few visitors but millions of hits daily. The goal, of course, is to get visitors, so forget about hits. You want to look at either visitors, or unique visitors (and likely both) as the imporant metrics of success with your website.

Of course, ‘visitors’ is itself a nebulous metric. What kind of visitors? How long did they stay? The goal is not just to get people to your site, but to keep them there (at least long enough to take the next step in the transaction). This is referred to as stickiness. In a nutshell, relevant content = stickiness. If you have what they came looking for, they will stay and consume that information. If not, they will abandon the site. All of this information is logged and stored in your Apache or IIS webservice logs. It can then be reported against by a host of free or pay-for-use analytical packages.

The best free stats package that I have used is called awstats and is a free open source tool that is easy to install and configure. It uses well established and supported packages so any web host should be able to implement. There are many other similar packages available, and most hosts provide their own canned packages as a part of your hosting package. But you absolutely need at a minimum ‘visits,’ ‘visitors’ and ’stickiness’ to be a part of the package.

Fourth, make sure that you have a robots.txt file. This is a very simple file that sits at the root of your website called robots.txt. It is a crude but effective convention to allow you to ‘model’ your site to search engines, by telling them what content to index and what to avoid. There are ample examples and resources on the robotstxt.org site to guide you, and it is quite easy to generate and test a working file. There is no ‘force’ behind this file, but it is a well established convention that is widely observed. The first thing that a search engine does as it indexes your site is sample the robots.txt file. It aids your searchability if you have a properly constructed file for them to sample.

Fifth, consider building a search engine digestable site map. This is an additional way for you to ‘model’ your web content to search engines. The best way to learn about this is to get a google webmaster account for free here. There are some good tools and resources in that repository for anyone trying to improve their online presence.

Sixth, submit your site to all relevant search engines and content directories. This can take some time, as you have to go to each search engine and determine how to properly submit your site. There are some tools such as godaddy’s traffic blazer which, for a nominal fee, allow for global submission with relative ease. Ultimately it is not terribly difficult and on the whole quite instructive to do the submissions yourself.

Seventh, have relevant content! Mark has posted on why this is important and how to generate such content already, and I am sure we will both say more in this vein. Content is king. It is the one thing completely in your control to help you win this battle.

Eighth, encourage relevant local resources to link to your site. This is a daunting task. The best way to be successful is to have a content relevant, useful and aesthetically pleasing site, and to brand and market it well. Doing so makes it easier to establish relationships that lead to crosslinking (you link to me, and I will link to you). The number, and quality, of inbound links to your site is one of the most important factors that determines the way that search engines view its relevance - eg its ‘rank.’

Ninth, add your business to all ‘yellow page’ and map type search directories that you can (yahoo yellow pages, google maps business locations just to name a few).

And finally, as always, rinse and repeat. Most of these items require some attention over time. Certainly you need to keep the look and content of your website current. You need to monitor your statistics and check your page rank and traffic patterns to determine if you are accomplishing your goals.

I look forward to elaborating on SEM and the interesting differences between Optimization and Marketing strategies.

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