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Why search engine visibility is crucial now: How to use SEO to your business’ advantage

By Chris LaFrombois, Senior Web-Graphic Designer

What is SEO?
As a Web developer, people are always asking me about search engine optimization (SEO). Because search engines are the primary driver of website traffic for most companies — according to comScore, Americans performed 13.7 billion searches in August 2009 — it makes sense that you would want to optimize, or improve, your ranking.

Effective SEO involves precise, strategic edits to HTML coding, image coding, site structure and copy that make a site more inviting to a particular search engine’s crawlers. Due to the complexity of most SEO initiatives, you will probably need experienced programmers and copywriters to help lift your site out of the Internet’s dark recesses and into the public eye.

Enquiro’s 2007 “Business to Business Survey” found that 65.3 percent of those who make business purchasing decisions turn to search engines first to research products and services. ComScore estimates that Google and Yahoo! account for 80 percent of these searches. Each one of those searches represents a potential customer — but if your website doesn’t register on the first or second page of results, chances are you’re being overlooked in favor of a competitor.

Paid vs. organic search
Paid search, a form of advertising in which companies pay to appear as the “sponsored” result in keyword searches, continues to grow despite a stagnant economy. Sponsored results appear before or on the right side of organic results (those that appear on search engines thanks to their inherent or earned search engine rank), on most major search engines. In 2008, paid search spending totaled $12 billion, according to the 2008 “State of the Market” survey of advertisers and agencies by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). While many companies sing the praises of paid search for branding and lead generation, tapping into the power of organic search is significantly less expensive, and in many cases, more effective.

Your website’s organic search performance is tied directly to SEO efforts. Unlike paid search, SEO can help make your site visible to millions indefinitely, at no cost other than an initial investment. This investment typically includes identifying keywords to use in any materials that will appear online (including website copy, press releases, etc.) and diagnosing and correcting any SEO-related coding issues. While SEO copy activities may be ongoing, incorporating already-chosen keywords and SEO best practices into future copy should incur minimal future costs.

In addition to being more budget-friendly, research supports SEO as a more valuable alternative to paid search. Among the findings:

Users are six times more likely to click on organic search results than on paid results (Oneupweb study, 2009)
The conversion rate — the measure of people who take the desired action (make a purchase, download a white paper, etc.) — of potential customers who click on organic search results is 17 percent higher than viewers who click on paid results (Marketing Sherpa, 2005)
More than 72 percent of users believe that organic search results are more relevant than paid results (iProspect, Survey Sampling International, WebSurveyor and Stratagem Research, 2004)
Sixty-six percent of Web marketers say favorable search engine positioning drives the most traffic to their site — more than e-mail marketing or any other form of advertising (Direct Marketing Association)

Tracking and analytics
Unlike traditional advertising, SEO efforts are easily monitored, quickly proving a significant return on investment. For example, when you optimize your website, you can see the site listing rising in the search engine ranks. More impressively, analytics programs such as Google Analytics track the amount of traffic coming from search engine queries, and even provide information on which specific keyword searches are delivering the traffic. These analytics can go so far as to detail the average amount of time search engine visitors spend on your site and the average number of pages they view.

Getting started
Several complex variables affect SEO — here are some of the most common and easily optimized:

URL structure
Your URL structure — the formula that determines the Web addresses of each page on your site — is one of the easiest and perhaps most obvious variables affecting SEO. The words included in your URL directly affect your search engine rankings. This includes not only your home page URL, but also the URL of every other page on your site, so it is important to choose your URL structures carefully.
Website copy
This includes which keywords you use in your copy, how often you use those keywords and in what context they appear. There is an optimal keyword density for each Web page, and using too little or too many of the same keywords can negatively affect your ranking. Additionally, using keywords that yield a high volume of results may not be effective in boosting search engine rankings, as competition is extremely high. The popularity of a keyword is determined by the number of searches it garners and the number of results that appears in a search for that particular keyword. The keyword “pizza” for instance, was searched more than 30 million times on Google in September 2009, according to the search engine’s Keyword Tool, and yields 129 million results on the search engine. The trick is to identify relevant keywords that are searched fairly often, but that produce little competition from paid and organic results.

Other copy issues, such as how high on the page the keywords appear, can affect SEO as well. Professional Web developers and copywriters can work with you to determine which keywords will be most effective for your website, and implement them in a way that will improve SEO.
Meta description and title tags
A meta description is an element in the website’s code seen by search engine crawlers. This is also the description that users will see when they view your search result. Creating a meta description and incorporating relevant keywords into this description can help improve your search engine ranking. The title tags are essentially the names of each page — the words that appear in the frame of your Internet browser on any given Web page. The words you choose here also affect your search engine ranking.
Links
Both the links you include on your website and external links that lead to your site matter when it comes to SEO. Inbound links from other sites offer an especially big boost in search engine ranking.

Ultimately, SEO is a marketing element that simply cannot be ignored, regardless of the size or structure of your business. And because search engine algorithms (the formulas that determine your site’s search engine ranking) are democratic by nature, every business — from the mom-and-pop shop down the street to a Fortune 100 corporation — has a shot at getting a piece of the search pie, regardless of budget or resources.

For information on how The Simons Group can help your company with search engine optimization, contact Lee Zoldan at lzoldan@thesimonsgroup.com.