Search Engines: Why Being Popular With SEs Matter by Deeba S. Hargis
March 18th, 2008The brick-and-mortar organizations of yore (alright, they still exist, don’t they?) used very creative techniques to catch the attention of the public in general, and their prospective customer / client base in particular. I still remember the colorfully-dressed stilt walkers, with huge placards hung in their neck in the front and at the back, displaying some or the other product. They immediately caught our attention. Sometimes they would offer chocolates and candies to us children; especially what was being promoted was some children’s store. And then we would stomp our feet and be asked to be taken to the store.
I remembered the stilt walker when I first set up my own advertisement agency long ago. Marketing had begun to become even more sophisticated and suave, and a lot of our time was spent in thinking up new and newer techniques for our client’s name to be the top in customer’s recall. The concept of Yellow Pages had begun picking up momentum then, because companies such as us would give the bulky directories to consumers for free (and charge advertisers for their entries in the directories). Consumers would then thumb through the directories to locate whatever product and service they wanted. Quite naturally, advertisers were willing to pay for a premium for their entries to be bolder or in a color different from the rest of the crowd, in order to catch the eyeballs of the reader first.
Cut to the World Wide Web and to the world of business on the internet. The terra firma that, as a business, you have to grapple with is the monitor screen that your prospective customer is watching. Obviously, you are not the only business running a website out there; in fact, if there is one place in this world where social equitability is firmly entrenched, thank you, it is the cyber world. So whether you are a Microsoft or the next-door mom-and-pop store doesn’t matter. You both have your own websites, with lots of good pages that talk about the products and services you have to sell, and customers who want to do business with you beat the way to your homepage and hit on the “BUY”. Plus, you are not restricted to customers residing in your locality alone. The entire world is now your marketplace, and customers from farthest corners of this globe, from locations you may not even have heard about, can come calling.
If only things were so straightforward! Sigh.
As you realize, just as in the real world, the internet world too is choc-a-bloc with stores and outlets similar to yours. So we have organizations that have taken over the task of yellow pages by presenting customers and internet users with tools called “Search Engines”, in which they simply enter the “key” words of the product /service they are looking for, and hey presto! Wherever in this world that product / service is available, is listed one below the other. Since one “page” of the monitor screen can take only so many entries, the listing can go into several pages (sometimes hundreds). As you guessed it, as an advertiser, you would most certainly want to be the top entry in this listing.
The scene in internet marketing now shifts to jockeying for top position in the Search Engine pages, or “Search Engine Rankings”, as it is popularly referred to. If you are anybody who has got anything to do with doing business on the web, it behooves you to be in the know about how the search engine lists work. In fact, the past decade or so has seen an entire new industry spawned around search engine “optimizations” and search engine marketing, and an entire dictionary of new buzzwords have been created in this process. The objective? To understand ways and means by which a given site may rank higher and higher in the search engine list for a given set of keywords.
The organizations that run these search engines are the big brothers of the internet. They are the movers and the shakers. Names such as Google (the biggest brother of them all), Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, AltaVista, Ask, etc are the most venerated people in the industry. These folks release every now and then very powerful programs called “Search Bot” (also known as “web crawler” or “web spider”) with the mission of fetching pages from all the websites from all over the world, and later feed them to the search engine program. The latter will then index these pages in the order of relevance / importance, so that they turn up appropriately in the search results later. The nascent versions of the search algorithms brought out by them were very naïve, for unscrupulous web masters could easily manipulate the rankings by feeding the search programs data in such a way that their sites would always pop up on top. Not any more. Stung by such rampant abuse, search engine owners have reacted by developing more and more complex algorithms that decide which site is good enough and which isn’t – and the most powerful of all is the concept of “PageRank”, which Google’s founders patented in the name of their alma mater, Stanford University. Indeed, on last count, Google has let it out that their algorithm now does the ranking of sites based on more than 200 different parameters!
In the new scenario therefore, how do web masters ensure that they remain in the good books of these powerful search engines, and at the same time get their websites to rank at the top or near the top in their rankings. Industry analysts give a few pointers.
The first in the book of tricks is coding, presentation and structure of the website itself. These have to continuously be aligned to Search Engine Programming techniques that Google and their ilk keep tweaking every now and then. Website designing should strive for a balance between jazzy animations that use Java / Flash on the one hand (which the search engine “crawlers” are not comfortable with, yet), and plain-vanilla text that might bore the ordinary user on the other. One aspect that is still very relevant in making one’s web pages visible is the content that one stuffs in the “Meta Tag” HTML element of the page. The Meta tag content should describe the webpage in such a way as to help search engines to put them in the appropriate keyword category. Another HTML element worth knowing is the PAGE TITLE, where the title of the document may be provided as succinctly and briefly as possible.
“Content is King”, they used to say. Never before has this saying sounded truer than now, when everybody seems to be caught in the fierce competition to lure visitors to websites. When people find your site has information that is useful and interesting, they will bookmark you or add your feed in their Google Reader, so that they get the latest updates. But if you dish out trash in the name of content, people will reject you, howsoever flashy and oomph-driven site you may have built. This appears commonsense, but most people learn it the hard way.
The next trick to be aware of is submission to search engines. This is where the offline “Yellow Pages” directory concept pops up again. We have something called as Search Engine Directories. A search engine directory is managed by human beings (as opposed to automated). Search engine submission may be to directories such as Yahoo’s Directory and the “Open Directory Project” (or ODP or DMOZ). Submission to crawler-based search engines (such as Google, Yahoo’s crawler, Ask, Microsoft Live Search) happens naturally, when you have “links” to your website from other websites (discussed in a minute). This is usually a time-consuming process, so if somebody is in a hurry, they may buy their way into getting a listing in the search engines (yes, money does make the world go round!). There are three very good avenues to invest for paid listings: Google AdWords, Yahoo Panama, and Microsoft adCenter.
Further in the evolution chain of getting the top ranks is the concept of “linking”. In the real world, the more the number of people who know you, the more popular you are considered to be. In the world of search engine optimization and rankings, the more sites that hold an address pointing to one of your webpages (called “backlinks” or “inbound links” in trade parlance), the more popular and relevant you are deemed to be, and consequently the higher you are ranked. “Link Popularity” is given a high priority by Google’s PageRank algorithm, so much so that people have made a whole new business out of setting up “Link Exchanges” or “Reciprocal links” (you put a link of my site on yours, and I will put a link of your site on mine) – either free of cost or against a fee. However, things got so much of out hand that search engines had to incorporate a kludge in their algorithms to detect websites with an overkill of backlinks, and to weed out such exchanges between websites that had no reason to be linked in the first place!
As can be seen from the above discussion, it does matter to be liked by search engines! And the way to be in their good books is to align the website to the best (and the latest!) search engine programming standards, use the right set of keywords and key phrases that describe the website just right, submit the website to the right directories (either free or by payment), make sure that the site receives good number of backlinks from other sites, and most importantly, have top-notch content on the site’s pages. And then, once all this is in place, simply go to Google, type in the keywords in the box there, and watch where your site comes in the rankings!
The story does not end here. This is a game where one has to be on one’s toes all the time! The rules keep changing every now and then, so what was considered perfectly legitimate yesterday may cause the once-darling site of the search engines to be banished today! So, the key is to keep in touch with the latest happenings in the industry, and keep on tweaking the site to ensure that the current rankings are not only maintained, but improved upon.
Search Query results returned the following . . .
Keyword Search: PageRank, Backlink, Prosecuting Visitorjacking Programmers, Incoming Links, Link Exchange, Link Popularity, Search Engine Ranking, Reciprocal Links, Web 2.0, Wiki’s, Social Network Engineering, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Ranking, Search Engine Programming, Search Engine Submission, Alexa, Googlebot, Freshbot, MSN, Yahoo, Google, Looksmart, Overture, Inkatomi, DMOZ, Open Directory Project (ODP), Joomla, Mambo, Google Adsense, Google Adwords.