When I was working in the field of search engine marketing (i.e., “marketing” clients’ sites to search engines so that they notice and highly rank them), I was often exposed to the school of thought that the issue is primarily a technical one.  Whilst technical issues are crucial to address (e.g. the major NZ B2C ecommerce site which effectively tells search engines to “go away and don’t try listing me”), they are not the sum total of the equation, and nor should they be.  This week I’m going to cover two key marketing and product tools which are crucial in the bid to score high rankings.  These are content and links.

Remember, when you visit a website you don’t care whether it’s search engine friendly – you’re a human, and you want great CONTENT.  Content is king!  As a person using the net to answer questions, pass some time, buy some products and so on, having a search engine direct you to a site which doesn’t fulfill your needs is not good for a) you, or b) the search engine, whose effectiveness at presenting you with the best sites to match your search is undermined.  Net users tend to become quite loyal to their favoured search engines and directories, so earning and maintaining that loyalty is crucial to the ever wavering financial fortunes of these search companies – hey, they’re just trying to make a buck!  Directing people to unsatisfactory websites does not make a good search engine business plan.

So in the ongoing campaign to ensure your site achieves and maintains high search engine rankings, it is vitally important to write great content which relates to and employs the selected search phrases throughout your website. When your site is found by a searcher they expect to see content relevant to the phrase they were searching for and will not stay around long if the content is weak or irrelevant to their needs. The more relevant content you have on the site the higher the search engines will rank your site for the important search phrases.  

But that ain’t all (hey, there are literally dozens of things to consider, some so incredibly subtle they’re clearly in the leave-it-to-the-experts category.  So let’s just focus on the marketing bits here.  I ask you, what’s one of the cheapest, yet most credible and valuable marketing tools around?  “Word-of-mouth” advertising should have been the response of many readers, or amongst those hip to e-marketing, “viral marketing”.  Having a large number of people recommending your site, be it via newsgroups, chat rooms, articles etc, is clearly good for site traffic and business. But in addition to this, search engines measure the link popularity of websites (i.e., how many other sites are linking to your site) in order to help calculate your ranking.  So you should strongly consider the need to develop a solid link building strategy among the top directories and sites related to your industry. The key here is to obtain as many links as possible from relevant sites who themselves have good link popularity and content. This means that links from large, well known sites are more valuable than links from smaller sites. Links to your site should be descriptive and include search phrases you are targeting because search engines read these links to determine the key theme of your web site.

Focusing on these two aspects will give you a good start in achieving better rankings, but keep in mind that, at the end of the day you shouldn’t feel bombarded with science when dealing with the search engine issue.  Whilst full-time experts will always be able to better understand what to do amid the ever-changing magical machinations of the search engine world, focusing on the aspects described here is something directly under your control.  And if your rankings don’t noticeably improve, remembering that many other factors still come into play, then at the very least your site now offers better content, and is more easily found, than it was before.  That’s a good thing, right?