In Search of Better Organic Rankings

Your customers need to know who you are before they invest in your products and services. Most companies delve into traditional advertising or direct marketing campaigns. Fine. But there is a better way.

Search engine optimization can increase brand awareness, attract targeted prospects and convert more leads than most marketing strategies. Sound interesting? You bet. Let me tell you how.  

The marketing power of search
I think we can agree that the website, the search engine and the browser have changed the business landscape as we once knew it. And it all started with Search.

In 1996, a young man started publishing editorial commentary about search engines. He was fascinated with how they worked, what they could do, who was searching and what they were searching for. He shared his knowledge, interacted with his audience and his commentary was well received. His name is Danny Sullivan, and his legacy is history.

1996 to 1998 was a period of explosive growth in new websites. Search engine submission services were offered to these websites so they could "be found." However, the quality of services varied widely, and there were many unscrupulous vendors.

One entrepreneur plowed through the noise and produced a methodology and a suite of tools for organic search engine optimization (SEO) that yielded high rankings within search engine rules. His name is Bruce Clay. As far as I know, and I think Danny will back me up, Bruce is responsible for coining the term, "search engine optimization."

Technically speaking
Search engine technology is complex; therefore, the challenge is to simplify the parts that make up the whole. In my view, there are three primary parts to a search engine: the spider, the index and the search leg.

The spider crawls the servers on the internet to find HTML documents, dumping them into the index. The index filters the HTML pages and stands by as a repository of data answering to the search leg. The search leg is the connection between a browser, the index and a search result. Confusing? Let's draw a diagram.

The filtering process in between the spider and the index is where the search engine applies its algorithms for organizing the data in its index. In its simplest form, genuine SEO occurs as an iterative loop of research, analysis, submission, monitoring and reporting. This process allows for a constant improvement of webpages as they travel through the search engine filter process from one month to the next.
 
This iterative process allows webpages and their content to be in the best form to comply with what a search engine spider wants to index. A search engine like Google is tasked with finding expert advice, knowledge, information and opinion while also ranking what it finds as the most relevant for a particular query.

The science of relevance is a responsibility Google and other search engines take very seriously. Showing respect for this science and understanding how a search engine works is the quickest way to acquire good organic search results.

There are three entities that need to communicate with each other for indexing and ranking to take place: the web site, the search engine and the browser.

The website
The server hosting your website is at the heart of the entire process. Its ability to communicate properly with the spider is of utmost importance. The server DNS configuration, its organization of certain files and its method for directing a search engine to various documents or URLs are also very important.

Think of the server as a handshake with the search engine spider; if there are issues hindering good communication between the two, the search engine will react accordingly. The engine has limited time to respond to issues while crawling the internet; it wants everything in proper order. It is likely that the websites with high organic rankings are those that have their servers configured and organized properly.

The HTML code on your website resides within the server and is also important to search engines, namely the search spider. Spiders like to eat simple HTML code; spiders process or digest simple HTML code much easier than JavaScript or complex code.

The search engine
A search engine such as Google is looking for subject matter experts to rank in its top organic listings on its search engine results pages. It wants to provide a good user experience to users searching its database by producing relevant, unbiased, useful information.

In order to accomplish this task while relying on the automated procedures of interpreting HTML code, the search engine must filter and store its data in a safe place, and that place is called the index. Therefore, after gathering data from servers on the internet, the spider filters it into the index.

The index is at the core of search engine credibility; if the index is corrupt, the search results will be also. This is why search engines take so much care in filtering and monitoring their index.

Getting your website into a search engine index is a good start toward acquiring high-ranking search results; however, the two are not synonymous. Metaphorically, being in the index vs. top 10 search results is the equivalent of driving a car vs. driving a formula-one at the Daytona Beach Raceway. There is a world of difference between making your website a subject matter expert in the eyes of Google vs. getting your website into the Google index. This difference lies in the training, skills and performance of your search marketing vendor and /or in-house team.
 
In 1996, being in the index was a win-win because the search leg had fewer than a hundred million documents to sift through. In 2004, it was estimated that Google was managing anywhere from 45,000 to 80,000 servers. Today, I'm not sure Google even knows how many servers it manages while indexing its eight billion+ web documents. Today the search leg must weave itself through billions of documents and return millions of relevant results within 16-hundredths of a second.

Let's assume that you query Google for your keyword and it serves 50,000 search results. To see your site in the top 10, it has to rank within the top 0.02 percent of all search results. Now let's assume your keyword competes with 1.5 million pages. To find your site in the top 10 search results, it must rank within the top 0.0007 percent [(10/1,500,000)x100] of all the search results! This is why you need more than a suit.

The browser
The browser is the location where a search request takes place on a desktop. It communicates with the search leg and index to return a search engine result page (SERP).

When you hit the search button, your browser is simply jumping on the search leg, tapping into the index and receiving the search engine's best guess at answering your search query with relevant results.

The remarkable event that takes place after the search is the CTR (clickthrough-rate). The CTR for organic results on Google is 28 percent for the No. 1 position and 3-12 percent for the No. 2 through No. 10 positions. When you stop to consider the number of daily searches for a particular keyword or phrase, you begin to connect the dots on traffic; there were over 5.5 billion searches in January 2006 alone. In fact, research and case studies have documented significant increases in the number conversions when a website enters the top 10 rankings in Google. 

SEO best practices
If your vendor or team understands how search engines work and you comply with their guidelines, it becomes easier to obtain superior results. Complying with search engine guidelines is a very important part of SEO best practices.

To arrive at best practices, the industry needs to adopt standards. This will bring more credibility to our trade. Developing best practices and industry standards will help replace the devious search engine optimization techniques that still tarnish our industry today. We at Red Door are fully committed to helping industry leaders establish search engine marketing standards and best practices.

SEO and the bottom line
As reported in the recent Outsell annual Ad Spending Study, companies are allocating 33 percent of their online budgets to website updates. The report further states that better natural search results are driving this trend. Organic SEO gives you a better functioning website, which in turn delivers a better bottom line-- a win-win for C-level executives.

By Paul J. Bruemmer -