oro|oro Teacherslab | How Search Engines Work

Introduction: In theory, the Internet connects everything and every person to every other thing and every other person. In practice, half or more of its billions of pages are effectively invisible, because they are never found. A new breed of professional helps people avoid the invisibility trap. Jill Whalen's company High Rankings helps optimise websites so their content can be found, and Heather Lloyd Martin's Success Works focuses on the writing, scripting, and editing of the words that appear in the main body of the site.

Jill Whalen
The Google search engine has over 1.3 billion pages in its index, and according to a recent study, 81 per cent of people find websites through the search engines. So, if your website isn't search engine-friendly, there's a good chance you're not going to be found at all. There are four main elements necessary to make a search engine-friendly page: the body copy, which is really the most important (Heather will talk about this); the title tag; the meta description tag; and the meta key word tag. These are all in the HTML code of the page. We'll briefly discuss how the results of a search engine operation can be very dramatic.

Heather Lloyd Martin
I'd like to share probably the biggest secret of search engine optimisation, which, although crucial for a successful campaign, is probably the thing that's least talked about in the resources: it's the words that actually appear on the page.

The actual visible HTML text that both the search engines see when they go to 'spider' (catalogue) a site, and your readers, or your prospects, will see when they come to your site. It's crucial to have strong writing for a website, because you're serving two very demanding masters. On the one hand, you have the search engines themselves that need to see the text written in a particular way in order to rank your site highly.

But you can't forget about your reader, the person who will click through from that ranking and hit your site. If you don't target your message, if you don't communicate with your prospects but rather just talk at them, you will lose them from your home page, rendering your optimisation strategy useless.

Here's a case study to illustrate this point, and show the process of getting from point A to point B in an optimisation campaign. It's a client called Georgetown Surgical in Lexicon, Kentucky. This particular site specialises in gastric bypass surgery - stomach-stapling for people who are morbidly obese. What they wanted was not only for their site to rank high, but to rank high regionally, which is even trickier. They weren't interested in a national market, they were based in Kentucky and wanted people who could drive into their clinic.

The client had come to us after working with another search engine optimisation company, and they weren't satisfied with the results. So we had to tweak what another company had already done. There are a lot of differences within the site, and so what we'll do is we'll show how we got from point A to point B as a way of showing the three main elements for writing for pretty much any campaign.

First, you have to have well-researched key phrases - words and phrases that people type into the search engines to find particular websites. The second thing is the text length, and what you'll see is that the text is longer and we'll discuss why this is so, and why it's actually better for the search engines and your readers. The third step is the tone and feel; how the writing sounds to your reader. Does it engage them?

To start with, key phrases are the most important thing you need to worry about with an optimisation campaign. It's crucial to research them for a website and to make sure that people actually search with those phrases. The goal with the copy is to work in two or three phrases and mention them about five times each.

The old body text copy had 84 words, and two key phrases each used once. The search engines just won't care about that. We used a specialised database called Word Tracker to find our two-to-three key phrases. Word Tracker amalgamates results from hundreds of different search engines to tell you what things people are actually searching for and let you optimise your site accordingly. If you don't research your key phrases, you run the risk of optimising for words that might get you a good ranking, you might get a number one spot, but maybe no one will search upon it.

In practice there's a balance involved to make sure that everything is researched and that people can actually use it. As for phrases that people search for, some of the old meta tags were 'Jenny Craig' which is a weight loss system, for instance; or 'problems when climbing stairs' which is probably a symptom of being morbidly obese, but is not directly related. What you do then is optimising for a great ranking, but no one will find your site because no one is looking for it under those terms.

So the second consideration is text length. Why is longer better with the search engines? Because again, you have to satisfy two demanding masters: search engines and your prospects. If you figure you have three key phrases and you're including them five times each in your copy and your word count per page must be kept to 100 words, you're not going to keep your prospects. You will not have enough space to develop a marketing message.

We found that, for maximum effectiveness, about 250 words is good for the search engines - considerably longer than 100. But it's done in such a way that it still engages the reader, and they can still click through to the inner pages, thanks to the tone and feel.

The next, and last, step is working with your body text. To be honest, search engines don't care about your tone and feel, how your writing sounds to your readers. But again, if you have a great number one ranking and they click to your site and the message doesn't speak to them, if they are bored, if it is so full of corporate-speak, they will surf away to a competitor.

In our new text copy, the first thing we did was add the word 'you' - it's very simple. When you're talking to someone you say the word 'you', and the Web is a very communicative system. Readers want to feel that you're talking with them rather than talking at them.

The second thing we did that's very important for any type of campaign, whether you're selling products or information, whether you have a university site where you want people to get information, is to energise the benefits. Tell your prospects what's in it for them. We did this with things like 'You don't have to suffer from the psychological and physical effects of being morbidly obese! There's a life-changing solution just for you. You can finally take control of your health.' Those are the benefits people wanted to hear. They want to know what's in it for them and they want to know very quickly, because it's very simple for them to surf away.

The last thing on the page is called 'action links.' Action links are things that you see every day. They are telling your readers what you want the next step to be. For instance, 'Call now!' 'Learn more today!' or 'E-mail us for more information!' We see this everywhere, in print and on the Web, and it's crucial as it tells people what you want them to do next. That will tempt people to click that link and go into your inner pages. Once they're in your inner pages, you've got them, because the longer they stay at a site, then the more chance you have of converting them from prospect into customer, or from someone who's just surfing information to someone who's downloading information you're providing.

To summarize, the three main parts of the writing are: well-researched key phrases inserted in your copy; have enough text, about 250 words, to satisfy both the search engines and your prospects; have a tone and feel that speaks to your audience rather than at them. Once the text is complete, the next step is working on your coding tags and submissions to the search engines, which Jill will discuss, along with assessing whether our case study successfully met the client's goals.

Jill Whalen
Once you've created great body text, the next thing you want to worry about is the title tag, which is in HTML code. This is a misunderstood tag, as many people think they need to put a title in this tag, a company name, but really you don't want to do that. You really want to put key words in this tag because they're given a lot of weight in the search engines and it will really help you to get ranked high. One site we worked with put their company name, just like a lot of people do, but it isn't helpful right now for getting them found in the engines. For the new title tag that we created, we basically took the same key words that they had based the text around and placed them in the tag. We also put the abbreviation for Kentucky, 'KY', and spelt Kentucky out so people searching in different ways would be able to find it.

Once you have your title tag, you want to move on to your meta description tag. The client's old description tag was very long. This tag is important for two reasons: you want to have good key words in it, because that can help it get found in the search engines. You also want it to be somewhat of a marketing statement because this is the statement that will show up in the search engine results. People will read this sentence if your site ranks high. And if they do see this, you want it to be something that will entice them to click the link and visit the site. They really only used one key phrase, which isn't helpful. It's hard to read, and it's not enticing to click on.

So in our new Meta description, we just made one sentence, put the company name in and kept it under 200 characters, because sometimes the search engines will cut it off in mid-stream if it goes past 200 characters. And we used the key words again in a simple statement. If someone was searching for this particular service, they would be apt to click onto this site. You want to work on your meta key word tag; their old one threw in all sorts of key words that really have nothing to do with their service.

This is a misunderstood tag, because people believe that any key words that they throw in here, their site will suddenly rank high for it, but it doesn't work that way: in fact the search engines give very little weight to this tag; many don't even read it. But it won't hurt to use it if you can, use your key words, not other words that don't help you to get found. In our new meta key word tag we took the same key words we were using for the title (you can put a few more in here). You can repeat words in this tag a little, no more than four times for each key word if possible. The word 'surgery' was in three times, because we put it with other words, such as 'gastric bypass surgery' and 'weight loss surgery'. What you don't want to do is say 'surgery, surgery, surgery' all in a row because sometimes search engines will ignore that - it's a technique some companies use to get easily found, but it doesn't work.

Once you've done your tags, you're ready to submit to the search engines and you also want to submit to the directories, which is Yahoo!. Yahoo! is extremely important because it is frequently visited on the Web, and if you have a good description in Yahoo!, it can bring a lot of traffic to your site. Originally, the company who did this site delivered a long sentence - it's a bit of marketing hype - and Yahoo! is famous for chopping descriptions off.

This is what they put: 'Provides surgery for weight loss' - and that's not very helpful for this site to get found because it's not using the key words. What you're allowed to do with Yahoo! if you use their business express service, which they did, which costs $199, is have one e-mail appeal. So we e-mailed Yahoo! And we suggested a description that's more to the point: it just describes the services - and you have to tell them that the description that you put in doesn't accurately describe your site. You can't just say; 'My site's not getting ranked high, so can you change it?' because they won't do it.

Sure enough, within a couple of weeks a new description appeared which was very similar to the one we put in, not exactly, but good enough, using our key words very well. It was a big help and now people can easily find the site in Yahoo! In a period of a little over a month, from 1 December to 8 January, we got some 2,280 highly targeted visitors from Yahoo!, highly targeted because they're all looking for these particular services and in this particular area. We also had 572 from AOL and four from MSN and two from 'others'. All the engines were pretty much covered.

As for rankings, getting top ten, top 20 is really what we strive for. We don't say, yes we can get you number one rankings, but with this site, we did happen to get a lot of number ones. High rankings are great, but what do they mean to a business? We talked to Doctor Bowler from Georgetown Surgical recently, and asked him, was he getting new business from the Internet? He was getting two to four new patients a week with his old website, and he's currently getting 50 to 70 new patients a week. That's a dramatic difference: he was nearly going bankrupt and was close to shutting up shop, and now he has to hire a new surgeon.

I'll end with a word about our profession. It's a growing field, and the problem is knowing which people to trust, and which not. There are a lot of people calling themselves 'search engine optimisation experts', and there are a lot different techniques to use, but not everyone is great at it. There's probably about ten companies right now that do it well. There are people who are doing online writing right now, too, although it's a fairly new profession. But there are only a few people on the Internet that specialise in the writing of search engine campaigns.

The crucial point is it's not what you want to say; it's writing so that, firstly, you will be found by people, and secondly, when they find you, they still want to read your stuff. That's what so important about speaking to your prospects. It's stupid having a one-way conversation when you want to share information with them. Targeting your copy towards your prospects allows you to share information back and forth. .