In this issue

You just delivered a wonderful new web site to your client, Acme Toys, and three months later you get a panic call. "The chairman's son has been on the web and he says that he can't find the site on Google".   What happened and what can you do about it? 

My experience is that issues around search engines are hardly ever thought about until the site has been designed and has gone live.  By that stage it's too late to do much about it. 

In this issue I am going to talk about the most important factor, which is the key word or key phrase that your prospective visitor will type in to the search engine and find your site.  I will talk about how you can anticipate the most common searches and tune your pages so they come higher in the search. 

Future issues will talk about other important topics around search engine positioning, but if your site doesn't have the right words then positioning is irrelevant because you are not in the game. 

Why didn't they find me?

There are a three reasons why your client's site wasn't found on Google or some other search engine:

1. You don't have the words on the site that match the search.  Google will only present pages that have the same words as the search phrase. 
   
2. You have the words on your site, but the search engine can't see them.  This is much more common than you might think and I will be devoting a whole future issue to this subject.
   
3. You have the words on your site, but your site is so far down in the Google listing that no one ever gets to it. To generate traffic from Google you should aim to be in the top 20 results returned (i.e. the first two pages) for your target key phrase.

So you need to know what words people are searching on, then start worrying about your position relative to the other sites that have those same words.

Choose your words with care

Lets take an example. If you type in 'wooden toys' on Google you will find web pages containing the words wooden and toys.  If your page only talks about 'handmade toys' you probably won't be found for that search. 

How do you find out what phrases people actually use to search the web?  If you employ a search engine optimisation consultant (SEO) he or she will have access to statistical information services.  As a first cut, you can get some information free from the Overture search engine web site.  This is very US oriented, and as we know they use the language differently over there, but at least it is better then nothing. 

To take our example, there are nearly nine thousand searches for wooden toy and a mere 183 for handmade toy last month on Overture.  So if your web site is tuned to 'handmade toys' then you could be missing out on traffic, even if your marketing department thinks that being handmade is a much more important selling proposition than being wooden. 

You need to tune your site for words or phrases that your prospective visitors are going to use.  But temper this with the fact that others are out there doing the same thing.  The odds are your clients chairman's son searched on some generic word like 'toy'.    Now there are 21,400,000 web pages on the internet containing the word 'toy'. The odds on being selected on Google are about the same as winning the lottery and I wouldn't bother buying a ticket on that one.  Generally speaking you will be targeting phrases rather than single words unless those words are very specific to your niche market.

OK - what do you mean by tuning - is that meta tags?

There is a commonly help belief that something called meta tags are really important.  They are not.

Meta tags are html tags that contain information about the web page.  One of the standard meta tags is the keywords meta tag.  The idea originally was that it would contain guidance to search engines.  Great idea, but so universally abused that search engines now virtually ignore them. 

When a search engine is deciding what page to place first in its listings, there are a large number of factors it takes into account.  One major factor is the usage of the words on the page. For example it might think the following places are extra important:

• The title of the page:  This is an HTML tag that is definitely very important.  Not only is it the first port of call for keywords, it is also the title that is placed on the search engine results. 
• Headings and sub headings:
• Text near the beginning of the page rather than the end
• Text in links to other pages
• Text where the separate words in the key phrase are close together

So we want to artificially pack the title and headings with our target keywords, but we want it also to be good copy to get our message across.  Inevitably this is going to involve compromise and a lot of work.

Lets not compromise - lets get round the problem

Supposing you could write the copy any way you wanted, but fool search engines by showing them a different page that was packed with your keywords.    This technology is called 'cloaking'. 

Google specifically tells you not to do this and tells you that if detected they may blacklist your site. I understand that there are arguments in its favour, but frankly the prospect (no matter how unlikely) of instant search engine death is enough to put me off.  Cloaking is one end of a spectrum of tricks, which I don't advise using unless you want to live dangerously.

So what do we do about this?

Think about what your web site is really about in simple terms and write about that in clear English including terms that people commonly search for.  Look at yourself in the mirror each morning and be proud that you are an upstanding Internet citizen.

Alternatively if the chairman calls again - maybe we take a chance.  Call me, I know some good cloaking experts!