If you think your friends and colleagues would enjoy this newsletter
feel free to forward it to them. If someone
sent this to you,
today. Outlook 2003 and AOL 9 users, please add us to your trusted or buddy lists, so you won't miss an issue.
KTD: I often say that SEP (search engine positioning) is an
art unto itself; do you feel that way?
KS: I wouldn't be inclined to disagree with you. The
techniques for search engine placement are fairly straightforward –
choose key phrases to target, then make pages relevant for those
keywords by using them in significant areas of the site. Generally,
I've seen folks interested in ranking high more than anything else.
"I care less," they'll say, "about ranking with
beautiful copy than I do about just ranking." The former, yes, I think one could well
classify as art.
KTD: Which are the major players in the arena today? I
remember when everybody used WebCrawler.
Is it worthwhile to look at sites like that or Alta
Vista anymore?
KS: Showing your age, are you? I think they're all
important, to one degree or another, but I encourage my clients to
concentrate on the engines and directories that are most likely to
drive the most traffic. If you're selling green widgets with mass
appeal, you're more likely to see widget sales if you're on Google's
first page for "green widgets" than you are, for example, on
the first page of WebCrawler. I like to see breadth; most people use
more than one search engine, because each provides different results.
It's great if you rank well for your keywords in one of the big
engines, but if you're ranking well in only one, you're missing a lot
of folks.
KTD: How have the recent changes to search engines
affected positioning practices?
KS: Emphasis is shifting dramatically toward inbound links
as a ranking factor, and away from content. Lots of folks (I'm among
them, to a degree) think that's troublesome, since it means we're more
and more likely to get a view of information that's weighted more
toward "important" sites and away from lesser-known sources
that may have tremendously valuable information to offer. It reminds
me a bit of broadcast television, "You'll get what we say you'll
get, mister!"
KTD: Is it really a war, or is there a more cooperative way
to work with search engine companies?
KS: A war sounds a bit dramatic. Really, we're all after the
same thing; we just have differing opinions of our own worth, I think.
We all think you should find relevant content for your searches. We
think my content is ideal, because it's all about my keyword.
Search engine developers are sick of being spammed by my keyword,
so you can easily see why inbound links are a decent way to determine
relevance through seemingly unbiased third parties. If another person
also says my content is relevant, you're more likely to believe me.
KTD: What are the prevailing attitudes among your clients?
Is everybody just fixated on ranking?
KS: It's brand awareness, but it's targeted awareness.
They're interested in rank, sure, because better rank means you're
more easily found. Easy pickin's means easy visitors, and those
visitors are more likely to be interested in what that site's got to
offer than your average Joe. After all, they were just looking
for it.
KTD: What can companies do on their own to improve search
results? When should they bring in a professional?
KS: Well… you realize that question could sound something
like asking a fox when the henhouse should be guarded, right? It's not
as mystical as it might appear – if you want to rank well for a
keyword, you pretty much write a lot of text about that keyword,
remembering that you need to convince folks to link to that content. There
are tags you want to be sure you hit, and ways you can squish in max
use per page, but it's not a whole lot more complicated than that.
Generally, you hire a professional when the time to work through the
details costs more than the money you'd pay to hire a professional.
Think of it as, perhaps, a virtual house-painting job.
KTD: What kind of results should companies expect? Which
metrics should they track?
KS: It's reasonable to expect an increase in traffic and
ranking. You'll also want to know where referrals come from and which
keywords led to your site. Most site tracking software will give you
those numbers.
KTD: Do you think pay for placement is worth the money? Does
it work, or do customers ignore paid rankings?
KS: Well, pay for placement can mean two things, and they're
both valuable. Paid placement usually means you're paying to submit
your site to an engine – effectively, you're paying to put yourself at
the front of a long line of sites that would like to be crawled. There
are also search engine advertising programs; Google and
Overture are
the big-daddy players there. You choose keywords, decide how much a
click is worth to you, and post a text ad that shows up in search
engines. There are some pretty slick advantages to these programs:
they're very hands-on, you can change your ads quickly, and you get
fast feedback on your messaging. You're also paying for performance.
If someone clicks, you pay. If not, you don't. That's a better deal
than a lot of the traditional CPM [cost per thousand] pricing that
just gets you exposure at a fixed cost with no guarantees about
performance. Oh, and clearly not everyone ignores these ads, or they'd
never draw traffic. Some folks are ad-snobs, some aren't. It's
personal taste with a little ad-sophistication thrown in.
KTD: Every so often, a pundit will step forward and declare
the imminent death of the free search engine. Where do you think SEP
is heading? Are we going to have some standard like Yellow Pages for
the internet?
KS: Boy, I hope not. I think a lot of the fun of the Web is
its adolescent spirit. Add that to a really useful source of
information and a hugely effective marketing tool... I'd hate to see
it become something as pedestrian as the Yellow Pages, where you see
only who's got the most money to throw around.
Many thanks to Kathy Slough for taking the time to be interviewed
this week. You can contact her through her site at Widemark.
If you have suggestions of web sites to review, writing that buzzes,
or a new way of looking at things, let me know. Send your suggestions to
.
If you received this newsletter from a friend, please
today. Our subscriber lists are confidential; we never sell or rent our
lists to third parties. If you want to
from this newsletter,
please let us know.
