Planning To Be Found - Tourism North East

Your Website: Planning to be Found

Having a good website is essential, but unless it can be found easily and rapidly through the search engines you'll miss out on a huge source of customers. Before you engage a web designer, before you even put pen to paper, you need to understand how the search engines work and how you can build your site for optimum performance in searches.

How search engines work

The vast majority of customers using the internet to find something start by typing what they are looking for into a search engine. The search engine then rapidly returns a list of sites that rank well for those particular words of phrases. In order to be able to do this the search engines have created indexes of sites and their relevance to particular terms. To build the indexes the engines regularly send out 'crawlers' or 'spiders' to 'crawl' over all the websites listed with them, 'reading' the text and also the Alt Tags (the labels on images) and the links to and from a site.

They use exceptionally clever linguistic programming to 'understand' the context of your site. They pay particular attention to your home page, which they assume summarises your business and therefore has more importance than your other pages, and also to your menus, which they assume sum up the most significant aspects of your business and products.

Each link to your site is treated as a 'vote' for your site. The more important the site that is linking to you, the more 'weighty' the vote is. This can have a very powerful effect on your rating. The crawler also looks at the relevance of the sites you link to. The more links you have to relevant sites, the higher your rating - although the links from your site carry nothing like the power of links to your site.

Finally they look at your web address and the descriptive text you use to describe your site to them. They then put all this together and 'rate' your site against different words and phrases.

There are billions of sites and any search term will generate hundreds of thousands of results. Customers generally won't look past the first two or three pages of results so it is essential that you build your site in a search-engine-friendly way and that you spend time ensuring the engines know about you. Your well planned, well crafted website will be utterly wasted, unless it can be found by customers looking for what you have to offer.

Getting it right

Google, the leading search engine (a whopping 86% of all internet searches in the UK are done through Google), says there are three key factors:

Build - Build a simple, clean website that provides genuinely useful information, with clear text and images (labelled with descriptive ALT tags). Give each page a relevant name and ask your site builder to add meta data (descriptive keywords) for each page.
Keywords - Think about the kinds of things people might type into a search engine to find a business like yours and include those words on your menus and in the text of your pages, especially the home page.
Links - Make sure your site is linked to from other, reputable sites, because the search engines count this as a 'vote' for your site. Also make sure that you link to other sites you customers will find useful. Sharing information is what the internet is all about, and the search engines reward those who promote it.

Google provide a number of pages to help you build quality, effective sites that do well in search engines, eg Building a quality site. Their main help area www.google.com/support/webmasters/ provides a whole range of easily digested information about websites and search engine ranking that you don't have to be a webmaster to understand.

Register your site

Before a search engine can send its crawler to you, it needs to know you are there. You need to register your site with the major search engines. This is exceptionally easy.

For Google, for example, you go to http:www.google.co.uk/addurl/?hl=en&continue=/addurl and type the address of your website, including the http:// bit into the box. You can then optionally add in a description of your site. That's it.

So for our imaginary watersports school we'd enter: http://www.northumberland-watersports.co.uk and "Professional watersports school in Bamburgh, Northumberland, North East England. Offer kayaking, canoeing, white-water rafting, wind-surfing, kite-surfing and surfing. Provide lessons, coaching, taster days, corporate events and family fun. Licensed by the AALA."

Registration with other search engines is just as easy. According to Hitwise (the leading market research company for internet statistics) in November 2007, there are only four search engines in the UK worth registering with - and two of those are Google! The top 4, with their market share of hits is:


Rank	Search Engine	Volume
1.	www.google.co.uk	71.63%
2.	www.google.com	14.53%
3.	www.uk.ask.com	3.63%
4.	uk.search.yahoo.com	3.06%

To register with:

Yahoo! go to http://uk.search.yahoo.com/info/submit. If you aren't already a Yahoo! member you'll need to fill in a registration form with your name, postcode, secret question etc, but this is straightforward. Actual registration of the site is the same process as for Google.
Ask! You cannot request to be submitted to Ask, it's crawlers will find you through links from other sites. This is another example of the search engines rewarding web site providers for using the internet the way it is meant to be used.

Pay per click and keyword advertising

Whilst it isn't strictly relevant to building your site, it's worth knowing about pay-per-click and keyword advertising, not least of all so you can decide whether it is relevant to you.

The type of results described above are known as natural or organic results, and the search engines spend huge amounts of time and programming improving their crawlers to make sure they provide the most comprehensive and relevant results they can - after all, it's what they build their reputations on.

Whilst you, therefore, cannot pay to improve your 'ranking' in these results, each time a result page appears there are usually one or more specially coloured advertiser panels either above or to the right of the natural results and you can pay to appear in these 'sponsored' results. Google, Yahoo and Ask all offer this kind of advertising programme.

Setting this up is very simple and controllable. You specify the keywords with which you want to be associated. The search engine will tell you what the set cost of being associated with each keyword is. It varies with how popular the term is, but it is usually pennies. Whenever one of your keywords is entered as a search term you (and other advertisers who have also specified the same term) will appear in the sponsored results. Only if a customer clicks on you in the panel (at which point they are taken to your website) are you charged the set cost - hence the term "pay per click". You therefore only pay for actual results.

As well as being relatively inexpensive you can also set a daily budget (and that too can be just pennies if you want). Once you've reached that budget you just stop appearing in the panel for the rest of the day. For more info, see Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Ask Sponsored Listings.

Concentrating on what counts

Big companies spend a lot of money on pay per click type advertising and on placing banner adverts on sites where they know there is a lot of traffic. A lot of money: in 2006 it was the fastest growing 'industry' in the US with literally billions of dollars each year being spent. Yet even the highest spending companies report that a staggering two-thirds or more of their total online business comes from people entering keywords into search engines and then clicking on the natural, organic results. And, of course, the organic results are free to every business.

So the best thing you can do for your business is to make time at the planning stage, so you get the basics right, and then continuously afterwards, to think long and hard about the words people may use to find a business like yours. Keep a list and while you're in the bath, making dinner, doing the shopping etc, think about search terms. Write them down and regularly update the text and the Alt Tags on your site to reflect them.

Don't forget, however, that the text must read naturally to the customer, you can't just put 'kayaking' fifty-five times into your home page, for example. For one thing, there's no point getting customers to your site if they immediately leave again because it looks like rubbish and for another, the search engines have already thought of all these tricks and will actually reduce your indexing of any particular term if it isn't being used in a natural context.

Linking

The other essential list to keep is of sites that might link to you, either because you provide them with information that is useful to their customers or because you pay to appear on their site. Get in contact with them and ask for a link or offer a reciprocal link. Don't forget that the search engines rank a link to you as a vote for your site, but they are also looking for links from your site to other sites your customers may find useful, because this promotes the way the internet should work.

Next steps:

The last column to fill in on the planning sheet is the Search Terms one. The words you enter in here are the words that a user might enter into a search engine to find a business like yours. Look over all the other columns and start writing down words that a prospective customer might use. In our example there are obvious ones: watersports, kayak, kayaking, canoeing, surfing, kite-surfing, whitewater rafting, lessons, corporate days, corporate events, team building events, heritage coast, coast, sea, seaside, flat water, instructors, qualified, experienced etc. Don't forget geographical keywords since more often than not a user will be looking for something in a particular location, and will enter their interest + the location into the search engine. We would add at least: north, north east, north east England, Northumberland, Northumbria and Bamburgh to our search terms list.

This list can get very long and it never ends. Ask family, friends and staff to think of search terms. Sit in front of your PC and use Google, Yahoo! and Ask to try to find a business like yours but in another part of the country. Visit the sites of the ones that come up top in the search engines and check their text, Alt tags and menu options for keyword ideas.

For now, write all the ones you can think of into the Search Terms column on your planning sheet. Asterisk the most important ones. When writing your copy (and thinking up titles for your menu options) bear these search terms in mind, they should feature prominently. The overriding principle with your website copy is to have readable, appealing text. But since customers won't find this copy unless you feature well in the search engines, you must make sure the content of your site reflects the types of keywords customers will use.

That's it - your preparation is complete. The next step is to Make a site plan.