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Three Myths on Boosting Search-Engine Rankings | |
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SoHo NEWS & TIPS
Helping You Make the Most of Your Small Office/Home Office
SoHoTIPS.com
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Greetings,
How do you improve your search-engine rankings without
making costly errors? Today's issue will help you avoid
common myths and make your efforts to improve your search-
engine rankings more effective.
Best,
Mandi
Be sure to visit the SoHo News and Tips blog!
SoHo News & Tips Blog
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Three Myths on Boosting Search-Engine Rankings
By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN
Small online proprietors often spend lots of time
and money trying to improve their search-engine
rankings, getting only poor results for their
effort.
To avoid costly errors, make note of these common
myths:
Myth 1. You can be guaranteed consistently high
rankings.
Dori Hession says she learned an expensive lesson
when launching her wedding-services business in
2000. She paid $8,000 in total to two companies
that she says promised to put her South Lake
Tahoe, Calif., outfit at the top of search-engine
listings for searches on popular phrases such as
"California weddings" and keep them high. In each
case, her site's ranking rose to the top at first,
she says, "then all of a sudden it would be gone
for a month or longer...When you fall off the
search engines, you're gone. You're out of
business.
Ms. Hession fell prey to a widespread mispercept-
ion that a Web site can be guaranteed rankings on
search engines. The companies she hired special-
ized in search-engine optimization (SEO), the
process of helping place a site high in search-
engine rankings when Web surfers look for inform-
ation related to the site. The firms claimed
"they could fake out the search engines," she
says, but she isn't sure exactly what the two
companies did. She has since learned that only
search engines have control over the way sites
are ranked in search results.
In 2003, she hired another SEO company that
promised only to improve her site's rankings and
keep them high. The firm, Pole Position Marketing
in Reno, Nev., achieved this by editing her site's
copy to include keywords, writing more search-
engine-friendly Web coding, and arranging for
related sites to link to hers, says Stoney G.
deGeyter, president. In a recent Google search on
"Lake Tahoe weddings," Ms. Hession's site,
lakeoftheskyweddings.com, turned up as the No. 9
listing.
SEO firms can't guarantee top search-engine rank-
ings because search engines are constantly
changing the way they rank Web sites, explains
Chris Sherman, editor of "SearchDay," a daily e-
newsletter from SearchEngineWatch.com in New York.
"No SEO firm has inside access to those changes.
The best they can do is study, analyze and adapt
to their procedures as best they can," he says.
Before hiring an SEO company, ask for references
from past clients to learn about their experiences,
he advises. "Good firms explain what they do in
very plain English, provide information on their
background and clients and give away free tools
for checking your rankings," he says.
Myth 2. I need to submit my Web site to every
search engine out there.
When Ice.com launched in 1999, the New York-based
online jewelry retailer hired a summer intern to
submit the site's URL to as many search engines as
possible. "That's what he did all day, and I can't
say we saw any tangible results," says Pinny
Gniwisch, Ice.com's founder and executive vice
president of marketing.
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Many new online sellers think they need to submit
their site to every search engine on the Web, says
Jamie Low, president of SearchEngineMarketing.com,
a consulting company in Lotus, Calif. However,
search engines find sites on their own from links
on sites already in their databases, he explains.
The more links a site receives, the higher up it
will appear in search results, he adds. "Being
linked to is probably the single most important
thing outside of having good content for getting
high search-engine rankings," he says.
Bear in mind that search engines look for links
from complementary sites, says Mr. Low. "It's not
just the quantity of links that matters; it's also
the quality of the links," he explains. "You want
to be linked to from sites that are relevant to
yours."
You can generate links to your site by publishing
a separate site as a company blog (short for Web
log or journal) with entries that include links
back to your site. Just make sure the content is
relevant to your company and offers information
of value to readers rather than serve only as a
means for boosting your Web site's search-engine
rankings, advises Mr. Low.
Since launching the first of four blogs in March,
ice-cream company Denali Flavors Inc. in Wayland,
Mich., has seen traffic to its Web site increase
by about 20%, says John Nardini, executive vice
president of marketing. The blogs, which also are
meant to help with customer relations, offer news
about a company-sponsored bicycling team, a
behind-the-scenes look at how it makes ice cream
and other information of interest to Denali
customers.
In 2003, Walter Pereira, president of Indoor Clean
Aire, a duct-cleaning and mold-removal company in
East Brunswick, N.J., asked the National Air Duct
Cleaners Association to link to his firm's Web
site. While he pays a membership fee to belong to
the trade group, his site's URL was posted for
free. "It's where we get 50% of our cold-turkey
leads," Mr. Pereira says. In exchange, his home
page links back to the association's Web site. He
says he doesn't regularly track his site's rankings
on search engines, but gets most of his business
from people who say they found his company on the
Internet.
Myth 3. Repeating keywords will increase my site's
rankings.
While search engines are designed to look for the
words that users choose, padding your site with
popular terms can backfire on a Web-site owner.
Unnecessary repetition of words can turn off
customers, warns Allan Dick, general manager at
Vintage Tub & Bath, an online retailer of clawfoot
tubs and bathroom fixtures and accessories based
in Hazleton, Pa. Mr. Dick says he tries to avoid
overusing the search terms that potential
customers might use to find his products, such as
"clawfoot" and "pedestal." Riddling a site with
excess keywords runs the risk of confusing
customers and driving them away, he explains. He
says he concentrates on producing copy that reads
naturally because "if we just wrote for search
engines, human beings couldn't possibly under-
stand it."
"You have to optimize your site for your customers
first and search engines second," he adds.
Overusing keywords may even lower your rankings,
says Mr. deGeyter. "Search engines have a way of
analyzing natural language on a Web page, so when
you stuff keywords in your site, it throws things
out of natural balance," he explains. For example,
some sites repeat keywords needlessly: "We offer
carpet cleaning in Arizona, carpet cleaning in
Utah, carpet cleaning in California and carpet
cleaning in Nevada," he says. "If you say the
same thing over and over, the search engines will
catch on and they'll penalize your site." Penal-
ties vary among search-engine providers, but they
typically will either bury your site in its rank-
ings or not list it at all, he adds.
DID YOU KNOW?
What about using something like fridge magnets instead of
the standard business card? What do people do with fridge
magnets? Put them on their refrigerator in their kitchen -
a place the family frequents, where they'll see your contact
information (and marketing message) countless times a day!
So what did you think about this issue? Drop me a line and let
me know at mailto:mandi@gophercentral.com
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