Stop singing your company praises from inside the stationery cupboard!

- some observations on Search Engine Optimisation from Dawn Gibbins MBE

First published by Real Business magazine, July 2008

It never fails to amaze me how often, when companies have a clear out, they discover boxes and boxes of old brochures and sales literature mouldering at the back of the stationery cupboard. They went to the trouble and expense to promote their wares but then failed at the last hurdle - getting promotional material where it should be, in the hands of prospective customers.

It's even more true of websites. After the excitement (and cost) of launching a site, most companies - yes most - allow their site to atrophy away, gasping for oxygen, at position 2,394 in Google listings. The oxygen they need is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The good news is most of your competitors will be in the same boat, so put on your SEO hat and you should fairly soon be top of the Google pile.

There are two ways to optimise your site. Spend around £1,000 a month with a company that specialises in optimisation services, or devote a few hours a week yourself.

How do the search engines decide which sites they will promote to top league?

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask use a number of techniques to determine the relevance of your website to public searches.

In the 1990s, it was based primarily on something called 'meta tags' - key words that describe the content of your site, hidden from humans but placed exactly where the Search Engines could find them. Website designers put them into the site for their clients.

Inevitably, this resulted in web designers stuffing their site with as many meta tags as possible, irrespective of their true relevance.

Today, meta tags play a very minor role.

Search Engines make extensive use of Spiders - highly sophisticated software routines that scurry all over the web, assessing each site.

Amongst other things, when assessing sites for relevance, Google's spider will weigh up:

• The domain name (I will explain)
• The page title (not what you think it is - I will explain)
• The content within your site
• The frequency with which content is updated
• The frequency with which key words and phrases are used within the copy
• The number of relevant links to your site

Domain name

Your domain name is simply the name of your site - the bit that comes after www. Anyone seeking to launch a new site should really think this through.

Let's take an imaginary company, Bartrak and Co, a plumbing company in Bradford. They have no desire to extend geographically, but do want to be found on the web by local households and businesses.

The most obvious domain might be www.bertrakandco.co.uk, available for £5.58 from companies like www.123-reg.co.uk.

But would that make sense? No it wouldn't. No householder in the area looking for a plumber would do a search using the term 'Bartrak' - they would most likely key in 'Bradford Plumbers'.

Try doing that in Google UK and it will list over three million web pages! If, however, Mr Bartrak had chosen www.bradford-plumbers.co.uk (also available for £5.58) - he could almost guarantee a listing in the top 10 of those three million pages for anyone using that search term!

If, on the other hand, you have, or are launching, a brand, then the converse is true - use the brand name and then apply both electronic and traditional marketing techniques to promote it. Easy Jet's website is www.easy-jet.com

Page Title

Every web page has a title - it's not part of the site, but it does appear top left of the screen. Have a look - the page title of this article is 'Article - Search Engine Optimisation'. Your web designer puts titles to each of your pages, and lazy ones use the same title for every page.

Check yours right now! On my own site www.dawngibbins.com I have a section called 'Winning', but the Page Title is 'Business-success-articles-and announcements'. Google loves it.

Content, content, content

Spiders use fiendishly clever mathematical algorithms to assess your website copy. They can't read pictures and they can't read all those clever animations. They read words. Each page should have at least 200 words. Spiders are even clever enough to assess the relevance of the content.

Change Change Change

Google also loves active sites - ones that keep adding new content. Their spider will visit your site once a month so, at a minimum, you need to add/change content with the same frequency.

The easiest way to do this is with a News section. Surely your business has something worthwhile to announce every month?

Weave keywords into your web

A lot of search engine optimisation is about anticipating the words that prospective customers/visitors to the site might use when they make a search on Google.

These search phases should be woven into the site (into the page titles and the page text).

The first terms that spring to mind may not be the most useful. For example, if our fictitious Mr Bartrak selected the most obvious word 'Plumbing', he would be competing with over 4 million other sites!  Rather than single words, it can be much more effective to weave whole phrases through your site. These are known as 'long tail' search terms.

The long tail term 'household plumber in Bradford' would compete with a more manageable 13,000. By simply adopting the tips I have already outlined, Mr Bartrak should easily get into the top 10 out of 13,000.

Inbound links

Google (and others) believe that a good measure of the level of interest a site generates is reflected by the number of other website with links to it. Makes sense.

This is the harder bit. You will need to take time out, finding sites willing to link to you. Members of the Chamber of Commerce, trade associations etc should check their listing first. Get your site listed in as many online directories as possible, such as FreeIndex, Small Business Directory, Thompson Local. Suppliers or agents may also be willing to link. Aim for at least 100 links.

Guaranteed top listing in all the main search engines?

You'll receive lots of SPAM emails offering guaranteed top listings for a small fee. Don't do it! Either they take the money and run (honestly) or they use what are known as 'black hat' techniques, such as linking hundreds of spurious websites to yours (these are called Link Farms).

Google is much too sophisticated to fall for black hat techniques and punishes sites that use them. One of the big European car manufactures was removed from Google for a few weeks last year as punishment for questionable practices.

Obviously, this has been a whistle stop tour. There are lots more things you could do to promote your site, but what I have described is practical (though time consuming) and it really will deliver page one rankings.

So much better than a website lost at the back of the storeroom!