we think

In the second part of this examination of the SEO and usability of websites I’ll be looking at the little value-add functions that Soda both offers and takes advantage of in order to keep us that one step ahead.

Firstly, as I pointed out at the end of my previous entry, there is the all important RSS Feed. Everyone and their dog is starting to utilise RSS nowadays as a way to make their web browsing just that little bit easier. Well ok, maybe not the dog, but let’s not see it as some fantastic new scary technology to shy away from. It’s actually quite old technology; don’t let these Web 2.0 guys fool you. What I’d like to know is where was RSS in the initial dotcom explosion? It was developed a short time after ’99. It worries me that it only now gets a big mention. What changed?

Either way, it certainly has huge merit. I personally use an external feed reader, watching subscriptions at more than a few media publishers, but I know that some of our creative department just use Safari‘s built in functionality. Becky has already mentioned her use of Google Personal Homepage. If you don’t use RSS yet, you have no excuse.

The next thing on our list of functionality is A9‘s SiteInfo. A9 is a search engine operated by Amazon, a step removed from selling books. SiteInfo is utilised by users who have the A9 Toolbar installed in their browser. It offers the site author the ability to add their own menu options into the Toolbar, hopefully helping their visitors navigate the site. It also allows the user to quickly search the site content. One thing I haven’t been able to confirm is if A9 is crawling the SiteInfo definition to better index pages on our site. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll put a secret page in there and see if A9′s search starts showing it.

The reason I mention crawling at this stage is because of our final two mentions. Like SiteInfo, Google and Yahoo aren’t to be left behind, they have their own methods to improve indexing.

Google decides to go its own way and published their Sitemap Specification. It’s been improved a little bit recently with its inclusion in the Google Webmaster Tools product, but the method remains the same. You create a specially crafted xml file on your website that includes information about all of your pages that google will keep coming back to check for updates. Think of it as a way of telling the Googlebot what pages it should look at and how often and you aren’t far wrong. Of course, nothing is set in stone and Google warn you that any instructions you include in your Sitemap is only taken as advisory.

Yahoo make it even easier. Just tell Yahoo about your RSS Feed and its Web Spider will keep checking that just like your own Feed Reader. Every time you update your RSS feed Yahoo gets the goods, just like your other subscribers.

People have been questioning why I haven’t posted anything to this blog yet considering the amount of time I’ve spent working on it recently. It occured to me that I may as well kill two birds with one stone and write a couple of entries about the work I have been putting into Soda.

Since launching the site a couple of months ago, we, like most people, have been monitoring the ammount of “buzz” we’re producing. It’s a well played game when it comes to websites, your traffic ultimately comes from a search engine, and if you aren’t playing to their rules you may as well not be online at all. But the blogosphere is more than just the old school; Google and Yahoo are a fraction of the landscape, which makes for a more interesting challenge than normal SEO.

For this first entry we’ll be focusing on Google, Yahoo and MSN as all are still very important traffic builders, and its here where I’ve been making most changes.

The first issue I’ve been solving is the way Google displays search queries that result in multiple page hits for this site. Because we quite often revisit a similar topic for our entries a search for Second Life in Google would result in a few entries on Soda, but happily Google would hide them all away under whichever article it thought was most relevent. Not having any of that, I’ve altered Soda so that each entry will appear in Google as a seperate result. After all, we are the most important source for any search query. Strangely, MSN and Yahoo love to do much the same, I’m hoping the alterations I’ve made will correct those results too.

The second issue we’ve been having with the search engines is a result of our own mistakes. More than a couple of entries were published prematurely before having titles, resulting in listings with rather funny addresses. Sadly, its these entries that just seem to continue bringing us traffic, resulting in a rather confusing message stating how the article is no longer here when someone follows them through. Fingers crossed, that one is fixed too. Soda will happily automatically redirect your web browser (and the search engine spiders) to the neat and tidy new entry. Flawless; Or it will be once the search engines update their listings.

The net result? Increased traffic ranking of course. Alexa says we’ve moved up 99,301 in three months, but that wasn’t the goal here.

Traffic means nothing unless you can’t keep people interested. Content is obviously the number one priority, but I’m no author. Instead I’ve been trying to improve the usability of the site such that our authors work isn’t interupted by any nasty errors or issues, as well as adding other value-add functionality for those that notice it. For those that don’t, they’ll be the subject of part 2. If you don’t want to keep coming back and checking for updates, I suggest you have a look at our RSS feed.

Recent research estimates that the annual spend on search marketing will be worth £1.41 billion by the end of 2006, with paid search counting for £1.26 billion and organic search optimisation counting for £147 million. From a spend of £855 million in 2005, £1.41 billion at the end of 2006 is quite a leap. However, since the total search marketing spend in the UK grew by 100% in 2005, the estimates seem to be on track.

Firstly, to clarify, there are two broad area of search marketing; paid search and organic search.

Paid search, often referred to as Pay per Click or PPC, is where marketers choose a list of keywords that they think their target audience will be typing into the search box. They then bid on these terms, much like in an auction and the price the pay determines where their term will appear in the list of paid search results, or sponsored links. These usually appear at the top and down the right hand side of the search results screen as shown below,

Natural/Organic search, on the other hand, works in a totally different way. The idea behind all search engines is to have a “spider”? that crawls the internet, indexing all the pages that it finds. Each search engine has a different way of ranking the pages, to try and ensure that the most relevant pages will always appear naturally at the top of the search results screen. In terms of search marketing, search engine optimisation, often referred to as SEO, can be used to adapt the structure, content and design of a site’s pages to make them appear higher in the natural search results.

The two types of search marketing are useful for different things. Paid search is a quick and guaranteed way to get your product straight to the top of the relevant search listings. It is possible to closely guard the amount spent and tangible results such as click throughs and conversions are automatically quantified.

Search engine optimisation, on the other hand, is an altogether more long term strategy. There are many things to consider in this case, site structure, site content, linking strategy and so on. Basically, the best way to improve natural search listings is to make a great site that abides by structural guidelines and offers relevant, useful content to your customers.

One of the most important factors is the site’s linking strategy. Basically, this is about who links into the site and who the site links out to. Linking will not only mean that your site is easier to find for other users, but, in addition, each incoming link is like a “vote”? for your site from another. It is crucial, however, to pay attention to where the links are coming from. Low quality sites, directories and so on will not do much to improve your site’s listing. It is important to ensure that only high quality, relevant sites link to your site.

An important factor to take into account before seeking useful inbound links is PageRank. PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance. The higher the PageRank, the more a link from this page is worth. It is essentially a “vote”? by all other pages on the web about how important a certain page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support.

If your site has a low PageRank, a potential partner site will often refuse a request to link because linking to your site can actually damage their page ranking. It is an exponential process, once your site has enough links to give a PageRanking high enough for important sites to link, their endorsement will send the PageRanking even higher.

Adding new, useful content in the form of articles, information and special services is a very important ongoing part of SEO. Search engine spiders are attracted by updates and so will crawl your site more regularly. It is also important to ensure that new incoming links are constantly being formed.

Improving natural search listings is a much slower process than Pay per Click. The search engine spiders take a long time to crawl through all the pages on the web, Google estimates about 2 weeks, so it can take some time before changes are noticed and processed. Additionally, search engine spiders have anti-spam capabilities and will see a sudden influx of a large number of links as suspicious. Therefore, it is important to implement a gradual and ongoing process, whereby rankings improve slowly but steadily.

There are ways to manipulate search engine optimisation so that sites climb the rankings quicker than they should. These techniques are known as “black hat”?, named after the baddie in cowboy movies who always wears a black hat. These techniques are unethical and when they are discovered the site in question is completely banned from a search engine’s listings. For example, earlier this year the German BMW site was de-listed from Google for employing black hat techniques. Not only is this embarrassing for the company, but their PageRank returns to 0 and the whole process of improving search listings begins again. Therefore, any company that advertises instant results for this type of search optimisation will be employing black hat techniques and should be avoided at all costs!

So in closing, Pay per Click is useful for new companies or products, to get the name out there and attract clicks from high sponsored link positions. Search Engine Optimisation is a more long term and ongoing solution, it may take some time for search rankings to improve but ultimately, once you have a high ranking, it is much cheaper to maintain than PPC.