 |
 |
|
|
| |
A
Tangled Web: The hide and seek of search engine rankings.
It
may seem an elementary point but all too many organisations
still fail to view their web sites through the eyes of their
potential customers. We’re not talking here about in-depth
analysis or years of data gathering, just simply logical thinking
of how you’d go about the same process if you were looking
for your own services or products.
Lets
look at a little example. Say we are wanting to find hotels
in Cornwall, for instance, then searching for ‘hotels’
would be pretty absurd…. putting it lightly. The 425
million results would take a lifetime to sift. To most people
it’s obvious that refining the search term would be
a reasonable thing to do. So a little more focused is the
term ‘hotels in cornwall ’, and would you believe
it, now we have just 1.3 million results. With some more refining
we can pin down an array of hotels within our required location.
Whilst on the issue of searching for hotels, why not try www.overnightuk.com,
a neat little - no frills website which will save you hours
of ‘Googling’. Anyway, the point being, anyone
using a search engine to it’s full potential will try
possibly numerous combinations of keywords to find what they
want. Hopefully it goes without saying then, that Cornwall
(location) will not always be the key factor. Instead this
could be anything from price to services to products to model
number…..to….well anything and any combination.
The combination of words (phrase) being the all-important
factor.
Another
common mistake is making assumptions of the type of keywords
organisations think their web site should be listed under
in search engines. Coming up with a set of keywords to test
out may be perfectly valid, but have they ever thought about
using the same keywords somewhere in their website? Often
organisations will have someone in a back office somewhere,
who’ll take it upon themselves to test out a huge range
of keywords in one of the popular search engines. This can
result in a dangerous blitz of e-mails and reports to higher
management, suggesting the reason for sluggish web sales is
the poor performance in Google for their latest keyword dream
list. The fault often rests in the fact that the website in
question has no content, meta tags, links or references whatsoever
to the keywords under test. So how do they expect to get hits
from a bunch of keywords no one ever thought to feature in
their website? The clear answer is to build pages you feel
have relevance to your industry or market and stop testing
for stuff you’ve not covered in your website. Indeed
anyone who concocts their ideal search engine test list shouldn’t
expect to see high rankings unless they applied the same thinking
when last adding site content etc.
We
need to remember that many people searching the web today
are relative newcomers. The obvious set of search terms are
not necessarily the set others will be using. Many organisations
test out a limited number of terms every so often, assuming
this is some sort of measure of how they shape up. What they
miss are the search terms that lead directly to their competitor.
Going back to the hotel example, it may be that ‘cheap
cornwall bed and breakfast’ is a winner for the hotel
down the road. Better still the hotel that thought to list
local visitor attractions such as the Eden Project, ie ‘hotels
near cornwall eden project’.
Ultimately,
for those who fail to adequately optimise their web site content
there’s always Google Adsense.
This
article is free to republish provided the resource information
below remains intact.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home
Services Portfolio
News
Contact
