The Ranking Puzzle
Last updated: August 1, 2005
By Chris Boggs
So you have recently spent dozens of hours or thousands of dollars to optimize your site or pay someone to do it. It's been about four months, and you are not yet getting results. Frustrated? Probably so. The reason could be that you or your consultant have omitted other important parts of what I call the "Ranking Puzzle." There are five major factors involved in ranking well in search engines: "Usability," "SEO," "Linking," "Advertising," and "Public Relations." The following article details how I define these puzzle segments, as well as how they can work together to create ranking synergy. (Added: Chris Boggs and Anita Schott recently wrote an e-book further discussing these fives steps, it is available for free download at this page)
Site Usability
Usability is an often underrated aspect when site designers aim to rank well in search engines. Usability includes multiple aspects: content, navigation, and accessibility being the most important. It is very important to provide relevant and non-trivial content to your visitors. The content must be rich, and yet not overpowering. You should offer value to someone who reads the material on each page of the site. With the right content, the amounts of time people spend on your site and their total pages visited will increase dramatically.
The navigation within your site must be simple. There should be a choice of ways for the visitor to reach more information on other pages or sites. Providing links within a navigation bar is not enough: you must provide text links as well, especially as more and more Internet users are becoming aware of their presence. This surprisingly time consuming goal is to make it very easy to find the important content.
Accessibility includes the aforementioned navigational aspect, but also refers to how helpful your website is in providing answers to probable questions. A well-planned FAQ as well as a site map are two ways to provide content to your visitor. As a marketing specialist, I like to include calls to action within this subheading as well. The chances are that if someone is visiting your site, they might like to be asked to call or email for more information. If you have an ecommerce system, never forget the ABC's of Marketing: "Always Be Closing!" The use of contact forms is highly recommended, as it allows prospects to pose specific questions, without providing your email addresses to all SPAM email harvesting programs out there.
Dr. Jakob Nielsen described in Designing Web Usability, "only 26 percent of users were capable of accomplishing…a task which…was to find a job opening and apply for it (averaged across six representative corporate sites with job listings)." (1) If I had a dollar for every time I tried unsuccessfully to find contact information within a website, I would be rich. Dr. Nielsen goes on to advise his readers that "site design must be aimed with simplicity above all else, with as few distractions as possible and with very clear information architecture and matching navigation tools."
Search Engine Optimization
The second biggest part of the rankings puzzle is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Chances are you have already heard of it, especially since you are reading this article. SEO incorporates many of the subjects discussed in the previous section about usability. Content can help increase the presence of popular search phrases and synonyms. Navigation within a site can be a big part of the SEO process as well, especially if you link within the content to further information each service or product.
Accessibility issues are addressed within a good optimization process. Site maps are often described as being more for the search engine than the searcher. I have never heard of anyone getting penalized for a too detailed site map. Google now even offers a sitemap inclusion portal, which can be of particular help in getting pages indexed that may have been missed or ignored in the past. It is recommended that you simulate Dr. Nielsen's test and ask someone to find a product price or a service description on your site. Can they do it with ease? If not, chances are that the all-important crawlers cannot either.
Inbound and Internal Linking
Speaking of crawlers and what their spiders seek, linking comes to mind. Although many including I would lump linking in with SEO since it is such an integral part of it, some companies treat content and traffic as the only two important factors. Linking is becoming more and more of an important factor in the rankings. A web site should avoid placing its link within a known "link farm," which is unfortunately easier said than done. Some link farms will even populate its pages with your links as long as you do not ask them to remove them. Although when this article was published originally I suggested that these should be removed, there is very little evidence that they can actually hurt you unless it seems as if you did this repeatedly in order to try to gain inbound links indiscriminately. Intent is very difficult for search engines to pinpoint.
Linking is beneficial if it shows that your website is in some way of value to the visitors of the other site. There are countless examples, but a link from a spa to a plastic surgeon would be of value while a link from that spa to a jeweler probably would not. A link from a life insurance provider to a wealth management company would be of value, yet a link from the same life insurance company to a travel agency would be useless. However, if it was a travel insurance provider, the opposite would apply! This is not simple arithmetic, and a lot of research is required to form an effective linking campaign. (For more info on "Linking," read this article)
Advertising Your Website
Lester Wunderman wrote in his 1996 book Being Direct-Making Advertising Pay, that a "leased store in a magazine still awaits an alert retailer and publisher to promote. Meanwhile, the Internet potentially offers even greater results." (2) He had described the efforts by a retailer named John Blye in 1950 to sell his products with advertisements at Esquire, and how it had offered an ROI of four dollars for every dollar spent. Amazon.com alone proved Wunderman's point. But even he could not have predicted the kind of ROI achieved by search engine advertisers today through the use of Pay-Per-Click (or Pay-Per-Performance) marketing.
One important factor in many search ranking algorithms is site popularity. The more traffic a site gets, the more relevant it must be in its industry. "Build it and they will come" only works in fantastic movies. Traffic must be driven to a website, and a very effective way to do so is to ensure that the site is visible within the top results for industry-specific searches. For those sites that have just started to think about SEO, or are patiently (we hope) awaiting results, an instantaneous way to appear within those top listings is through the use of PPC through such channels as Google™ and Overture™. Remember however that PPC costs are like death and taxes: they are inevitable. You must be prepared to continue to pay for leads on a cost-per-click basis.
Other more traditional methods of advertising must not be ignored. Banners can be very effective if placed on related web sites and in an area of the site not normally reserved for banners, which people tend to subconsciously ignore. Radio spots that repeat the site's URL will help those without immediate access to the Internet to remember the address. The same goes for all print and other Medias. If an organization has an Internet presence, omitting the website URL from ads is like forgetting to mention the name of the company. One question often asked is if the use of a popular keyword within the URL will help ranking. Many organizations have actually purchased extra URL's in order to attract listings for particular keywords. This has gotten a little out of control, with many sites employing hyphens within their "home" URL. The better way to include keywords within a URL is to do so within the URLs of categorized sub pages, keeping the home URL free of hyphens and more likely to be remembered.
Internet Public Relations
There are two important aspects related to using Public Relations to benefit a site: how the site interacts with clients/customers and prospects; and how to use press releases and other forms of announcements to drive traffic to a site. Customer service can make or break any business. If someone orders a product from an e-commerce website, they probably would like some form of response from the site indicating that the order is being processed. Another contact when the product is shipped goes even further in helping the site's credibility ratings. Simply processing the order and shipping it is not enough. An organization should take the extra step of communicating clearly and often with clients.
If a website has just been redesigned or if it is offering new or increased value to visitors, these are great reasons to distribute a press release. Believe it or not, many search engines pick up press releases and assign extra value to them, especially if they offer relevant information to searchers. It can be helpful to optimize these releases to include popular keywords related to the industry. It is also beneficial to use press release distribution services such as PRWeb™ that specialize in disseminating information to accepted Internet news channels.
To recap, there are five major pieces to the puzzle of ranking well within search engines. Any of these five works somewhat well alone, however the synergy created through the use of all of these website promotion techniques will far outweigh the individual efforts. SEO and paid search work extremely well hand-in-hand. Other forms of marketing and PR efforts also blend well. Usability will help ensure that all visitors (including crawlers) will find what they came for. If the five pieces described mesh well, the performance of the site will undoubtedly improve.
Comment on this article at my blog.
1. Nielsen, Jakob. Designing Web Usability. 2000 New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana USA
2. Wunderman, Lester. Being Direct-Making Advertising Pay.1996 Random House, New York, New York USA
Chris Boggs,
SEM Specialist and Contributing Writer
Instant Position
