Search Patterns

Search engine optimization firms help dot-coms get top billing on all-important search engines.

With more than 2 billion documents already on the Web and an additional 1 million pages added each day, a major part of Web site marketing involves letting the world know that a site exists, and then bringing in qualified leads to said site. While banner ads and offline marketing are obvious elements of that effort, the stone that kills both birds is a prominent position on the right search-engine results list, since, according to studies by the Georgia Institute of Technology, a whopping 85 percent of all Internet users go directly to search engines to find what they are looking for online.

Those users are also much more likely to take an action when they get to the site they've selected from a keyword-search results list, says Andy Johns, chief financial officer of New York-based Internet technology and ad distribution company 24/7. "They are highly qualified leads: The person who has typed in that keyword is clearly motivated to follow through, so you don't just get a clickthrough, you get a dramatically increased rate of conversion after the click."

Given the size of the Web, the sophistication of search engines and their expansion to include portal functionality and human-edited directories, marketers now need to know how to get top placement on the right search-engine results pages, ideally the ones a site's potential customers cross every day. But how is a marketer-who may have little experience with search engines, keywords, spiders or even what his ideal customer is likely to physically type into the search field-going to climb the ranks on a results page?

Enter search engine positioning or search engine optimization (SEO) companies, whose job is to make a Web page relevant for the keywords that are in it, or to amplify the existing keyword content of a site's documents. While some SEOs have been regarded in the past as digital mercenaries for getting their clients on top by any means necessary, according to Danny Sullivan, editor of U.K.-based SearchEngineWatch.com, others have gained respect and legitimacy as their services have become more sophisticated and crucial. "There are a few people who will go to very big extremes to get good rankings on the search engines," he says, "and they generate significant problems for both the search engines, search engine users and those optimizers who are trying to play by what good rules exist."

Proof's in the Formula

Sullivan explains that, contrary to the persistent myth that search results are up for sale by most portals, achieving a prominent position requires technical finesse. It also requires the keyword matchmaking skills of a digital yenta.

"The core skills that a good SEO has-understanding how people search, how to place sites in areas where people are searching and how to target those sites toward particular terms that makes sense for the client-take time to develop, and most advertisers and agencies don't have the time to do that kind of research or develop that expertise," Sullivan says.

Fredrick Marckini is founder and CEO of search engine positioning firm iProspect, whose client roster includes Sharp Electronics, Schering-Plough, inc.com, Kitchen Etc. and other companies in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and Internet and financial services. He explains that the trick of the trade is not merely getting a client listed on a results page, but getting a berth in one of the top 30 slots, "since the 85 percent of Internet users who start their Web sessions at search engines rarely, if ever, pass the first three pages of results."

Marckini points out that iProspect's services include running a detailed analysis of a site's past performance and ensuring that the keywords-the search terms users type into search engine query fields-targeted for the search engine positioning program are the ones being queried by the target audience in the major search engines.

He points out that as recently as last year, when search engine positioning was still something of a cottage industry, positioning meant merely writing the right keyword meta tag (HTML characters and phrases that search engines "see" but users don't) on the right Web site page. "Three years ago, if you put a keyword meta tag containing five words on your page, you'd get a ranking for most of those words," Marckini says. "Of course there were only 100 million documents on the Web. Today there are 3 to 5 million indexed in the average search engine. As recently as a year ago, there were eight major search engines, now there are 20, including human-edited directories and portals with their own networks."

Keywords Equal Leads

Search engine positioning is not something advertisers or ad agencies are likely to tackle themselves, which may explain recent alliances between search engine positioning services, interactive agencies and advertising networks, according to Sullivan. He predicts the trend will continue.

In August, San Francisco-based Organic formed a partnership with Arlington, Mass.-based iProspect, which Marckini founded in 1996. During the same month, New York-based Internet technology and advertising distribution company 24/7 acquired WebsiteResults, an Internet technology company that drives increased traffic through keyword optimization. The acquisition was through an all-stock transaction valued at $95 million.

"Search engine positioning may be just one part of an online marketing strategy, but it is the fundamental part," says Tom Kiernan, Organic's vp and global director of marketing services. "It's the baseline." he says. "If you are doing nothing else, search engine optimization and keyword-related advertising can make up 80 to 90 percent of traffic."

Cliff Hawk, product manager for Seattle-based interactive advertising company Avenue A, agrees. "Statistics suggest the majority of companies are pursuing strategies to get better rankings in search engines." He says search optimization used to be the domain of smaller firms that couldn't afford a large advertising budget, "because there's little incremental cost to building a Web page or redesigning one, whereas the larger companies could afford advertising and portal deals." Now, he says, large companies are using search engine optimization as well.

He explains that since there are two types of results-directory and spidered-optimization services fall into either directory submissions or search engine position services, though many are a hybrid. "Directories are human-powered, so changes in Web design won't effect them. Search engine results will change as you change your site." He says search engine optimization firms may take two broad approaches: optimize a Web site's pages so they rank better on search engine results, or leave them alone and create "doorway" pages that never existed before, entirely designed for search engine function in mind and statistically more likely to get better results.

How many SEOs are there? "I'd put them in the hundreds," says Hawk. "I've spoken with probably 50 firms, but there's a lot more." He says Avenue A forms partnerships with SEOs on a client-by-client basis.

A Question of Human Behavior

In 1997, iProspect's Marckini wrote a book on search engine positioning, "Achieving Top Ten Rankings in Search Engines," as a free source for clients of WebPositions, at that time the only software that could measure a site's ranking on a search engine. WebPosition clients could suddenly see their ranking, but didn't know quite what to do about it, according to Marckini, who explains that at that time the lack of standards and lack of automated Web site-ranking software meant a weekly ordeal of engine-by-engine cataloging, manually. "If you wanted to see how you ranked in 1997, on the eight major search engines with 10 keywords, you had to type the query for each keyword in each engine, and scroll down the list 10 by 10. It could take 30 to 60 hours a week."

While automation has made Web site ranking easier, the increasing sophistication of users has helped make optimization a lot more challenging. "More and more, Boolean-type searching [in which operators such as 'and' and 'or' allow more complex queries] is becoming more prevalent," explains Avenue A's Hawk. Not long ago, he says, most search queries were expressed in one word. "Someone might type 'cruise.' Now they type, 'I want to go on a Carribean cruise.' And people are typing more questions than they used to." He says it's becoming more important for people trying to optimize themselves to understand how different kinds of searches and different types of search engines work.

Marckini adds that the ever-changing nature of search engines complicates matters more. "It is essential for a company to address all the relevant search engines, or it will exclude a large segment of its target audience."

Ultimately, the best search engine positioning services may be the ones whose strong suit is the amorphous world of human behavior: How are certain kinds of people likely to ask for certain categories of a Web site? "The additional value-add we look to bring to the table [with WebsiteResults] is not just technology, but also the business process of understanding the keywords that are going to be best targeted to a client's page, and the one that optimizes conversion," says 24/7's Andy Johns.

Fundamentally, according to Marckini, search engine positioning is an iterative process. He says iProspect's minimum engagements are for a year, and it's between one and three months before first results materialize for a typical search optimization campaign.

"We recently hired a woman with a doctorate in linguistics to help us evaluate the keyword universe, because different audiences construct their queries differently, and you capture your audience based on the way they compose a query," says Marckini. He also says one of iProspect's clients is a Fortune 100 manufacturer. "When we looked at their log files, we alerted them to the fact that their number one driver for traffic was the keyword 'swirl mark.' They'd been selling abrasives and rubbing compounds, but the whole world is looking for something that removes swirl marks." Language is the rub, so to speak.

Cracking the Top 30

Sullivan agrees that, ironically, effective search engine optimization has to address the human who begins the query, and the people who edit directories. "If every search engine came up with paid listings, and that was the only way a site could get listed, someone still has to understand how to buy those listings," says Sullivan. "Most clients are unlikely to want to take the time to do the research to find out which terms to target." Also, he says, submission for review is still going to continue no matter whether the search engine goes toward a human-edited database or a spidered one.

Who needs search engine positioning? "It cuts across all verticals and business categories," says Marckini. "No company that wants to thrive on the Web can do so without a top ranking on the major engines. You can spend a million or two on a Web site, but if you don't do the things you need to do to make it found in the major search engines in the top 30 matches, your million-dollar Web site is a billboard in the woods." n

Spiders Weave a Tangled Web

Web site developers may spend a lot of money on elaborate site design, but without paying obeisance to search engine spiders-the automated applications that drive search engines and supplement all portal and directory services-it's a design no one will see.

"But, search engine spiders are very simple creatures," says Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect. "They crawl the Web much as they did four years ago, looking for pages with big, centered headlines and three paragraphs of text and a graphic. When pages look much different than that, they don't do so well." Avenue A product manager Cliff Hawk explains that among ways to influence spidered results is to make sure keywords are framed by meta tags, of which there are three kinds: meta tag titles, meta tag descriptions and meta tag keywords. "Getting recognized for the relevant keywords means making sure that those keywords are in the page title, in the URL of a site's domain name or extension and referenced within the content of the page itself," he says. A Web site selling a product or service may have a page within it with 1,000 words of copy describing its product, but unless the name of that product or what it does is written in the title, or meta tagged on the page, the page may as well be a blank sheet of paper as far as a search engine is concerned. "If a page isn't being found on search engines, the site designers selling a product may have simply failed to put that product name in the keyword meta tag," says Marckini, "or in the title and the meta description."

Another hurdle for spiders is the query string, essentially a question mark with data after it, which identifies a user session and session ID, according to Marckini. "Sometimes it's the result of a dynamically generated page. Shopping carts, for instance, frequently indicate their presence on a page." Since most search engines can't index Web pages that contain them, a "work-around" has to be done, a process involving changing a system setting so the page is displayed without the string or without the question mark. "A work-around," says Marckini, "is some change in the system setting that presents the dynamic page with a more 'normalized' URL, that does not include the question mark or session data."

While graphics are becoming vital components to Web site design and creation, spiders can't read text embedded in them, says Marckini. He says site pages built entirely in Macromedia Flash, JPEG, or another graphics format, in which all content is contained in graphics, have to be retooled so that a search spider is served keyword meta tags for that page-instead of HTML titles such as file.jpg1 or file.jpg2. "Macromedia Flash is written as a graphical interface," explains Hawk, "as is Java or image maps. Within the content of that page, you want to make sure you are mentioning the relevant terms."

Marckini says the difficulty spiders have of dealing with graphics evinces an essential problem for Web sites that want to be found. "Web site building technology is outpacing Web search engine technology."-KG

About the article
This article is by Karl Greenberg and first appeared in AdWeek.