New Tactics for Search Optimization
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Vol. 18, No. 11
BOSTON MA - By now, it's no secret that search engines can
lead huge numbers of sales prospects to a company's Web site. In fact,
the latest tally is that Web users now conduct 325 million searches every
day - and the number is rising. For many companies, getting ranked near
the top of a Google or Yahoo keyword search is now a top priority in their
lead generation process.
But getting high-ranking (or "optimized") search
results can be a rather limited strategy, argues Backbone Media's Greg
Jarboe. "The real question is, are your prospects actually searching
for the keywords you're using? If they aren't, getting ranked highly could
be absolutely meaningless."
Jarboe points out that search optimization has become increasingly
sophisticated in the last two or three years, largely because new analytical
tools can help companies carve out well-defined keyword strategies. "Most
of the analysis is surprisingly easy," he adds. "The hard part,
as always, is figuring out what to do with the results."
Jarboe recently offered several ways to take advantage of
new search engine optimization tools and tactics:
- Find the keyword sweet spot: One of Jarboe's favorite analytical
tools is WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com), a service that automatically
monitors hundreds of thousands of Web keywords. WordTracker can identify
how often people actually search for specific words and phrases, and
also reports how many competing sites use these keywords. "We
usually see that a few words dwarf all the others in search traffic,"
says Jarboe. "That's the sweet spot."
- Develop a segment strategy: Adopting popular keywords means that
a company's Web site will show up in searches, but Jarboe points out
that the real challenge is to emerge near the top of the search list.
"That usually means you'll have to define a market segment for
yourself where you'll rank in the top ten or so of the links that
the customer sees." For this purpose, Jarboe recommends the free
Search Term Suggestion Tool that's available on Overture.com, a pay-for-click
service (www.overture.com). "Just type in a keyword and Overture
will tell you how many people searched for that word last month, and
will also tell you how many people searched on related terms. This
gives you an instant measure of the size of a market - the kind of
research we used to pay huge amounts of money for in the old days."
Overture - which sells click-through ad links on many leading search
engines - also displays a running auction-style list of the price
that companies pay to appear in premium positions. "You can see
exactly who the serious competitors in a segment are, and how much
a lead is worth to them."
- Rewrite your site copy: One way to move up in search engine rankings,
Jarboe points out, is to make sure that keywords actually appear -
and appear often - in descriptive text on a site. "If one of
your keywords is 'product naming,' make sure that exact phrase shows
up all over the site, especially at the top of your home page."
- Post your own press releases: "Every press release on your
site is focused around a search topic, whether you know it or not,"
Jarboe says. "A lot of people - press, investors, buyers - search
for press releases as a way to collect information, so your keywords
should be part of every release. Put them in the headline, the first
paragraph, and the boilerplate at the end." Actually distributing
a press release over the wires is usually a waste of money, he adds.
"The wire services are now sending out over a thousand releases
a day. If you talk to reporters or editors, they've mostly stopped
reading the wires - they're using search engines to filter the news
stories that they cover."
- Look at your site through a spider's eye: Search engines regularly
send out "spiders" to catalog and index the content of various
sites, but Jarboe notes that spiders don't always see the same things
as human visitors. "Spiders can't read bit-mapped text, they
usually ignore sites that rely on an instant refresh, and they like
to follow clearly defined links. If you do everything else right and
then make it hard for spiders to navigate your site, your rankings
will suffer."
Greg Jarboe, chief marketing officer, Backbone Media,
240 Bear Hill Rd, Boston / Waltham, Mass. 02451; 781/899-4050. E-mail:
greg.jarboe@backbonemedia.com.
Editor
Jeffrey Tarter
jtarter@softletter.com
617/924-3944 x15
Publisher
Carol Crowell
carolc@ucgtech.com
781/751-8653,
888/400-4768 x253
Associate Editor-Research
Sayat Ozcan
sozcan@softletter.com
781/320-8909 x272
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