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Search top tips - CIMA Members 16th January 2007

Hi, I'm David White from Weboptimiser. I would like to thank the CIMA Organisation, and Harry and Jenny for arranging everything so far, and here we all are. So thank you very much for coming along.

Advanced search engine marketing... we've been in search engine marketing business for about 12 years. But before we go there, I just really want to embarrass myself for a moment. I was brought up around here and as you can see I haven't been here for a long time, the photograph was taken when I was last in Cobham.

We are here to talk not about me but about the myths of Internet search. The issue that is important about Internet marketing and search marketing is that it is so accountable and very, very measurable. I'm not going to do hundreds of slides, I could do, it's my favorite subject. I'm going to try and keep it to about 15 or 16 and try to give you the summary.

The top tips are all available at one of our websites called searchtoptips.com. Weboptimiser, we set it up really before even the search marketing industry existed and people were seeing "It will never work. Search? Who will use that?" And, back in those days the exciting things were Hotmail and Altavista. And nowadays of course, there's MSN, Yahoo, Google and Gmail and some would say nothing has changed. Primarily, the objectives are fundamentally to communicate, educate and inspire, to help people understand how we can use search, how we can use websites. And still a lot of websites are impossible to find on search engines.

This is a unashamed plug for Weboptimiser here. Just to start with, this is a screen graph that we took today and as you can see we typed in "search engine marketing" at the top. Here we have Weboptimiser here and here, twice on the page. We have the natural search results and these are the results that Google delivers through its algorithm and it has determined that when you type in that search term, our website, weboptimiser.com, should be the number one. Thank you Google!

But it's because we have created content and we've organized it for the search engine to understand that it's there and you know what this is better sites out of all of the millions of site in this category. So that's very nice of them, thank you! And then the second area, we pay for. And everyone can pay for. But in the beginning of search, when they first introduced pay per click, the more you paid, the higher the position. That situation has developed, you no longer pay for your position. You pay per click, but you don't buy your way to the top in the same way. There has been a new development a couple of years ago, called "the quality score". So to achieve the number one position in pay per click you need to have a good website as well.

The reason is, is that, if you think about it, Google's objective is to deliver the very best results to its users. So you need to take good care of the sites, of what you deliver to your customers, to your potential customers, your visitor, to be honest and to give them what they are asking for, so the page they click through to relates to the search term that they have typed in. So in some sense that's very, very straight forward. But nowadays they measure this thing called "quality score" and even on pay per click that makes a difference.

So if you have a better website it now follows that you can pay a lower cost per click to achieve number one on the pay per click results. I'm sure as accountants you all like that. It's cheaper and it's fantastic. So why does it matter, being number one? Here is a heat map. The red area is where most clicks occur, covering number one, number two, number three. So this is why we like putting our site in our clients' sites, at number one, number two, number three. Because it's going to get most of the clicks. People spend a lot of time refining their search.

So, actually, and we know this from other research, people will time in a search term, look at what appears here, not click, but edit their the search term and press the button again. And you probably recognize there yourselves. I do it. And when we are happy with number one, because this is the one that we want, we'll click on it. And that's why we love Google. Because it tends to deliver the kind of websites that we want. This demonstrates that positioning counts.

But the first thing is analytics and this is the biggest mistake or the biggest thing that people fail to do and to my mind, I'm sure to your mind too, it's nuts. You can put analytics, you can put tracking software on a website for no cost at all, and as a result this analytic software can show you what clicks occur and if you know where your clients are coming from or your visitors are coming from and if you know what they do or really how quickly they leave and if you can track it and you can see it through some analytic software then that it is going to provide you with some great insights.

The head of Google Analytics gets much more excited and says "It's a marketer's dream" And I think it is. Because it shows you where your visitors come from, what they do and how they leave. And if you know those things you can change your site and you can present your visitors with low hanging fruit or honey and give them content on the site that interests them and holds their interest.

As an accountant I'm sure you realize the benefits of first identifying where you are starting from and then tracking and seeing how the business of your website improves. "Search engine marketing spoils design" is a common myth. Basically I would suggest you that you should design what you would like to design, to create a website the way you need the business to present itself. It's your calling card and as you build it you can optimize it. And usually the problem is that text - words that people read are embedded within the graphics.

There are two kinds of graphics: the normal graphics, the JPEGs, the fixed image, done by a designer and the flash graphics and you can use graphics and achieve good optimisation, you just need to separate the text, the words in the site from the images and you can place words on top of images and achieve that.

Pay per click it doesn't matter so much, although, if you go back to the quality score I was talking about a second ago, you don't just achieve positions in pay per click according to how much you pay any more, it measures the relevance. But the spiders go and check-out your site and looks at your site and if it finds relevant text it will actually give you points or 'kudos' if you like. So that might affect your position even on pay per click no matter how much you pay. So again, you can improve your pay per click using the same technique that you would employ as if you were doing natural search optimisation.

OK, now the technical bit. This is about as technical as it gets, folks.

The issue here, which I have covered already, is to separate the design of the site from the content of the site which you can also separate from the functionality of the site.

So for instance, you might have a website promoting a product or a service, there might be some pictures of that product or pictures of people, we have video on our site and you might have a back end shop, an e-commerce system, a transactional process, a booking and order form. Traditionally, order forms, booking systems, places where you put your credit card information are done on secure servers, are normally done on a separate website that probably looks very similar to your main site.

We don't want to optimize that, we don't want search engines entering and reading credit cards so they can remain nice and secure. And all your customer data, your product, your stock records, we can block search engines from reading that. So what I'm saying is the transactional part, the business end if you like is traditionally already separate from your main website. So we only really have to concern ourselves in many ways about the design and separating the content, so that content being the words. The only thing search engines can read or understand is the words. So the technical bit here, CSS, I'm not going to explain the full meaning of Cascading Style Sheets, but that's what CSS stands for and anyone in the web market, web design should understand all about CSS. It is a system that, if it is at the heart of your website, automatically separates content from design or functionality. So that is a conversation you should definitely be having. And that's a top tip.

The next one: name the images. You can name every image. So if you sell pianos, name the piano, give it its part number and explain what you need to. Sometimes, we don't want to name images because there's too much text on the page, so there's a process known as tagging, also known as Alt tagging in this case. This is an alternative name for an image and it's precisely the point that search engines cannot read images, they don't have eyes as we have, they just read words, so there's a way of putting words into a site, relating to an image, and that's a tag called an Alt tag. That's something your web designer might do, or something that you can do yourself. It's very easy to do. The last two comments are the site map and tables. These have very much to do with the structure of a website or a web page. The site map is really just a page full of links. Try not to exceed more than 100 links; ideally you don't want more than 50. And if there are more than 50 have more than one page of links, I would say, multiple site maps. Give a site map per section. In fact, if you can organize your website that it is in sections, in product sections that relate to your business, that's much better for search engines and you might find yourself getting listed in more areas. And the last technical bit, don't use tables, use div's, which have other connotations unfortunately. But basically, the table system is a beginning of the internet method of creating a website and uses the hell of a lot of code to basically put pictures and put words in certain places within the page. CSS, which I advise everyone to use on their website, just makes that much, much simple to achieve. That's it, that's the technical bit, we're over.

How to validate your site

So here's what a couple of you already asked. How do you all know if your website is technically proficient? Does it work? If you go to http://validator. w3.org, enter your website URL, the address of the website, it will then tell you whether your website passes or fails. If it passes, fantastic, move on to the next one and check out your CSS, which is the next validator, and if they both pass, brilliant. And the key is, if they pass here, that means your website is going to be very, very readable to search engines. If it fails, these validators won't tell you exactly how to fix it, but they will highlight the problems on your site and they will give you a list of key points that you can then mention to or print to or forward to your web designer and say "We've got to fix these things". If he can't help, I'll be glad to. And the last point here: we like to put funny things and bits of software and tools and toys on our websites and they are great fun for humans to use often and we enjoy them. The problem is, quite often, search engines can't read them and also they don't necessarily make sense to the context of your site, so CSS is a separate file and Java Script should be put into a separate file, separating in a way, it's the same thing I said earlier, separating in a way design from content, from functionality into three different areas.

The CSS and Java Script are two functionality areas that confuse search engines. So what we do is we take the code, we put it into a separate document and we let your website call it when it needs it. Again, this is something your web designer should be able to do easily; I'm just trying to give you a conversational start if you're not already there.

Add great content

Now, great content to you is not necessarily the same as great content to your visitors. Often we would describe our business in our terms, in our jargon, so I'll use terms like CSS and things that I know about, but actually it doesn't make sense to non web people. What I'm really talking about is simplifying the design and separating the functionalities, but actually I should be saying as I have said, simplify the design and separate the functionality and I think that's a bit more understandable than saying CSS. So if I'm trying to sell CSS service I need to address it in the kind of words that my customers might use. And this is a key to making a website achieve a really good quality score. Because if people type in a search term and actually get a page that they are expecting to find and it makes sense they are going to stay there, enjoy the page and Google would have the great pleasure in delivering you to that page. Everyone wins.

Competitive benchmarking

To help you, you can look at your competitors; there are key word analysis tools. For instance, when you type in a term into Google, sometimes it says "Did you mean..." and then gives alternative words. These are the kind of free tools that you can access. There are tools that you can buy but just that simple process of searching for something similar to what you sell and using the words you want to use will show you other words that relate to your product or service. Also at the bottom of the page on the Google results, as well as on yahoo or MSN, they often say "alternative search terms", or "additional search terms" or "search terms related to what you were searching for" and what they are is a list of terms and words that other people searching for similar thing often use and you can look at those and you can think "That's an interesting way". It can give you ideas of describing your content. And if you take that onboard and starts with those terms and say to yourself "How would I describe what we do starting from those terms?" you would probably end up with a descriptive piece that would be very useful to search engine users. So this is reasonably basic and often through re-evaluating, and in our business, the times that we have to do this and take out clients to it is still very common and very often.

I've mentioned tags for images. Every page and every image, where possible, should have this. And every individual page throughout the site should have an individual title. We should almost be able to theme each page, so that there is a main theme to your front page and then there is kind of a tree of themes, other themes that can be addressed by the site map that I spoke about. Each page throughout the website should have an individual theme as much as possible and that's sometimes difficult to do because we like to relate things but the more that we can hold a theme on a page the more relevance and the stronger the focus of that page to a search engine and ultimately of that page to a potential search engine user. And part of that the meing is the way that we label objects like photographs and images and also the way that we title the page. But we don't want to get too creative, so we don't want to use words in the title of the page that don't actually exist in the page. When that occurs it starts to confuse people and if you have a title that says one thing but actually it's something else you are gong to get a poor quality score at Google.

So nowadays we like to talk about the importance of you site is about 30 to 40% of the whole picture to natural search and the other 60% is the links that the people have created elsewhere within the web that link to your site. Some of this links will sit within directories and there is a classic directory that Google relies upon which is called dmoz.org. And all you need to do is to register your site, submit your site and describe your site and someone will come along as a member of dmoz.org and read what you said about your site and answer "Yes that is true" and hit a button and your site will be listed in Dmoz. It can take a while but that would give you a link within a relevant part of a directory and it will actually bring traffic and it will be very useful for humans. Fundamentally that's the key when we are looking to achieve links we'd rather have fewer links that are very high quality rather than thousands of links that are actually meaningless. So to make them more meaningful we want the links to come from places that are relevant to your website. So, a subsection of a directory will be very relevant.

So here is a clue. If you go to Yahoo.com and if type in the search box "link: www." and then your competitors' URL it will then list up all the links that exist for your competitors and you an see where your competitors are getting their links from and guess what? You can go and look at those websites and send them an email or register on their site and basically ask the site owner to give you a link and that's a way. You know, it's slow but it could well deliver you very high quality links.

This is the last of my top tips for today: pay per click. Here you go: use analytics, this is the absolute key, ensure relevant landing pages. Make sure that what they search on, what they click on and what they are delivered to is consistent so that when they search on something they get what they were looking for. And that way your pages, your site will be more sticky, you'll get a higher position, you'll get a higher quality score, and whole thing will just work better. It's common sense really. Employ a call to action. This is another thing that clients often don't want to include or don't include and it can be a simple phone number. But these are the things that you can measure and you can put into place that people will respond to. And when they respond they can drive your business and that can help, obviously. In per pay click you can use a system called dynamic titles and what you can do is you can target certain phrases and with a dynamic title what it does is it takes a phrase that people have typed in and puts it in your pay per click result, makes it bold and it makes you advert stand out above the others. And again it's about relevance. If you typed in some words you pressed the button and you got a list of sites come up and some of them have got the same words you just typed in that are bold you are most likely to click on that one.

The region targeting is a recent thing and I think it's going to develop certainly through the use of mobile technology. And certainly you can now pay per advertising to appear on mobile phones because so many people are now searching from their phones and they are delivered an add quite often, Google advertising appears on mobile. And so you can save your money by going into the region area. You don't want to have clicks in Japan if you are not selling in Japan and if your business is based around Cobham with Google and the other search engines we can limit your region and get your business very, very targeted. That help makes it very effective. This is a big issue, the trademark. Many, many companies have trademarks but what they don't realize is often your competitors will go and target your trademark. But if it is your trademark and you have paid for it and it's registered you can just send the trademark number in an email to Google, and we'll do it for you if you like, and they will just stop other people form bidding on your trademark So that will mean your cost for bidding on your own trademark would be low because there will be no competition and you will be much more likely to get number one position because there would be no one else there. So lowest cost per click highest position, and it's your trademark that gives you that. And lots of companies amazingly don't seem to realize that the trademark protection applies online. But it does.

And the last tip here is to capitalize URLs. Again this is just impact, the human eye impact relating to the search term. If accountants in Cobham is your website name and someone has typed that in, then that will be a very reasonable thing to do. And again, quite a lot of people seem to forget to do these basic things, but they can make a lot of difference to the clicks that you get.