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Tempted by "professional Search Engine Optimisation"

to increase incoming referrals to your website?

05 March 2002: Perhaps you should be! To understand the issues, the longer term implications and understand potential risks and rewards you need to proceed with maximum knowledge ...read on below >>

Referrals from search engines and directories are worth money. Search Engine optimisation or positioning is competitive. Getting referrals from the free search engines is not free.

Caution there are sentences I like to call "reality rants" in this article. If you have a faint heart or are at all sensitive or incompetent please leave now!

Sales & marketing professionals seeking to generate new business or enquiries know that all marketing communication channels have an associated cost, be they:

Direct response advertising
General brand advertising
Public relations
Editorial
Sponsorship
Direct telephone-marketing
Direct mail

There is a common misconception that Websites and Internet marketing is different.

That somehow just having a website which is basically online most of the time means customers will flock to your door.

In reality little could be further from the truth.

As your competitors build and entrench their positions more strongly, and as search engines roll out pay for placement and online advertising to improve their business models the idea that the Internet offers a free marketing lunch is looking more and more unrealistic.

Clients whose sites were developed by graphic design companies to look great, which were built in flash to appear cool, or whose sites have not been updated or revamped since the managing directors nephew created them in Microsoft Frontpage Express in 1998 are simply not going to be generating a fraction of the return they could be making for their companies.

Such sites serve simply to reduce expectations from many small and medium sized businesses in what can be achieved using a website as a marketing communication tool to nothing more than window dressing.

There are still free to enter search engines yes, and they do drive lots of visitors to websites in response to searches, but your obtaining a good return on your website investment using them is anything but free.

*reality rant starts*

If your site was designed by someone who did not take humans AND search engines into account, in the basic design of the website, it will cost you more to get a significant number of referrals from the search engines for that site.

If you and or your decision makers are as inept at analysis of the effectiveness of your sales and marketing communications budget as you were at choosing a site designer who was not conversant with search engines then you are unlikely to be capable of persuading your decision makers the financial benefits of developing your site.

You may as well leave now.

If you are unable to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of your existing sales and marketing costs, what are you doing in sales and marketing management?

You may as well leave too!

*reality rant ends*

Anyone still here?

Assuming you are able to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of your existing sales and marketing initiatives I have no doubt you will have been persuaded you need to rank better in the search engines to attract more searching users to your website. (By the way "I have no doubt" and I have evidence to support my "cost effectiveness theories")

If you have been persuaded to consider someone offering professional Search Engine Optimisation, the rest of this article is for you.

First how do you expect to pay?
1. By the hour?
2. By the results (rankings in search engines by the month)?
3. Based on their hard sell or your impression of their experience?

How will you calculate future risk?

"What risk?" you may well ask, "if I choose option 2 "payment by results" then if there is no return I pay nothing."

I reply "That is true but there is the potential for significant damage arising from someone doing search engine optimisation on your behalf."

You would be wise to understand the risks and interrogate both your objectives and their methods in depth before taking the plunge.

Risks include:

There could be a penalty applied to your domain for a number of different practices, which only a few months ago were thought to be quite safe.
You could be hooked into paying indefinitely because ceasing payments might close down your referrals.
You could be delayed from investing your efforts in a better long term strategy for your website and as a result loose time, the most scarce commodity of all.

How or why might risks arise?

There are three generic strategies that can increase incoming search engine referrals to your website.

1. Onsite development:

To improve the way search engines see and index your website and the relative importance (ranking) they give pages within it in response to specific search terms.

Such work should make your site more closely target your own commercial objectives and should target key terms that are relevant to your offering that searchers are entering in the search engines.

Such development can include lots of research, work on textual contents, graphics, layout, directory structures, internal linking, domain names, hosting, log files, activity and referrer reporting, ranking analysis, database coding and scripting and lots more.

Good work in this area should be compatible with improvement to the human interface of your website, the way users move about and the speed and clarity with which key information is displayed.

This work isn't free and, while not exactly rocket science, if you don't already know what to do it will take you a year or more to learn the tricks of this trade.

2. Offsite development:

To improve the importance that some search engines give to your website as a whole and directly drive visitors to your site.

This can include inward link development to drive inward visitors and boost the link popularity which key search engines assign your site.

These can include real links from legitimate sites with significant visitor rates and or links from a web of support sites and pages built for the principal purpose of increasing the importance given to your site in the search engines.

3. Paying directly for returns or Advertising on the net:

This means participating in pay for listings programs, paid entries into directories and basically paid advertising on the Internet.

If you take this route you still must evaluate the comparative effectiveness of your communications just as if you were using any other communication channel.

Summary

All of these three cost money and time (which is money) for either a professional or for someone in house to do.

I repeat - none of this is free.

Any or all of these three should involve considerable research on the behalf of the developer to ensure that strategies compliment the specific agreed objectives and have a good probability of overcoming the relevant competition, that tactics employed will not exceed current acceptable practice for the target search engine thus reducing the risk of penalty and that the end result will make human usage of your website more not less satisfactory.

It should considerably raise your suspicions if anyone promises first position rankings for your target key terms, this will not be in their power to deliver. The most you can reasonably expect is that over time the rankings of your pages against target key terms should rise in the search engine concerned. Assuming you can reach the first two of the search engine results pages and your targeted key terms have been researched well, and are terms that are regularly used, you are likely to increase the number of relevant visitors to your website considerably.

A cynical view of the SEO perspective.

Some professional SEO (Search engine optimisers) may be tempted to do offsite development because it suits their business model better than onsite work.

If you scour the relevant newsgroups you will find plenty of references to pyramids, cloaking, cross-linked domains, sub domains, the importance of link popularity, themed links and so on.

Many discussions will appear to focus on offsite means rather than onsite.

It is interesting to note that there are significant advantages to the professional SEO if they can use offsite means to increase your results for example:

Their secrets are more likely to remain secret.
They need not get client agreement for page, layout or text changes onsite that can involve revealing specialist knowledge. From the SEO point of view client approval for onsite changes can cause significant delay in achieving improved ranks, this matters if payment by results has been agreed.
Their work can and almost certainly will be taken down if you stop paying them.

While offsite work may be more in the interest of the independent search engine optimiser I argue it does not serve the clients best interest because the client only keeps improved search engine returns while they keep paying the bill. Further the client is directing funding away from onsite development so their site contents are more likely to stagnate.

Thus critical questions are:

How much to pay?
Over which period?
Will improved returns continue after you stop paying?

Referring back to the three generic strategies. Only most of item 1 and the real inward link aspect of item 2, depending on how it is done, are likely to remain in place providing an increased referral rate after you stop paying.

Item 3 is like any advert, as soon as you stop paying the effect starts to die quite quickly.

Implementing any of the three generic strategies badly may result in penalties, while you continue paying, or a significant reduction in results you attain after you stop paying.

A final critical aspect, oft forgot, is that when you have persuaded searchers to visit your site for the first time, your site must contain something of value or interest so they can either proceed to the checkout, look around, or return later for a further look.

My conclusion is that the only strategy compatible with longer-term increased referral rates, which can then lead to conversions, is a focus on on-website development.

By this I mean the direct development of your site to achieve good ranking (regularly checked) against well researched target key terms in key engines, and development of real inward links from compatible sites and suitable directories to drive relevant traffic to your site.

Author: Mark Abraham mark@sticky-marketing.net
05 March 2002.

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