If your CEO – or Managing Partner – can't find your website, it may be because of your search engine optimization strategy – or because you don't have one. This was the conclusion of Jonathan Ashton, during a ‘webinar’ put on by the American Marketing Association. Ashton is the co-founder of SEO Logic, a company that specializes in guiding businesses to better search engine placement. To attest to their success, if you type ‘search engine placement’ in Google or Yahoo, SEO Logic is usually one of the first two listings.

Why should you care about search engine optimization? Consider this: of the hundreds of millions of searches conducted every day, over 90 percent start with a search engine. And with billions of pages indexed on the web, many sites never get found. So to be successful on the Web, getting your site into the top search results can be crucial – and it requires work.

Which Search Tools Matter Most?

The tools used to find a company’s – or law firm’s – website are divided into two main categories: search engines, which use automated processes to find websites, and directories, which are human-edited web resources. There are thousands search engines, but only two main directories: Yahoo! and Open Directory. Both of these directories are important.

Open Directory is a free, human-edited directory managed by a network of approximately 10,000 active volunteer editors. It is important because it shares its results with so many other search engines – over 250 sites in total including Google, and AOL. For a complete list of sites using Open Directory data, click the link below.

Yahoo! is important because of its popularity. In fact, SEO Logic calls Yahoo! “THE directory on the Internet,” because it gets as much traffic as almost all the other search engines combined. This popularity means “you must submit your site to Yahoo!,” according to SEO Logic, “and you must pay” the $299 annual fee. However, since Yahoo! is an interesting merger of information, you can still get traffic from Yahoo! without listing there. When Yahoo! doesn’t find an exact match among its employee-reviewed websites, it supplements the list with Google’s search engine results and ad placements from Overture, a company that lets advertisers bid for placement in its search results.

Among the search engines, Google is important for many reasons. “Google is an amazing search engine,” says SEO Logic. “You can add your URL for free” and Google will “index almost anything.” But the main reason for Google’s importance is its extreme popularity. It has become the fastest growing and most popular search engine, due in large part to user satisfaction. In fact, over 40 percent of the searches performed on the Internet today go through Google. Additionally, Google results also appear on Yahoo!, AOL, Netscape and CompuServe. An online survey conducted during the webinar confirmed that Google is clearly the search engine of choice, receiving over 70 percent of the votes.

Another group of sites to think about when planning your strategy are the meta search tools, which take pages of top results from other engines and compile them into a single location. The problem with these search engines, according to Ashton, is that they have become too clogged with paid advertising results, making it hard to find useful information.

Businesses that cater to consumers may also want to consider a few major portals that play a significant role in the business-to-consumer marketing space. Sites like AOL, MSN, and Netscape are important because they are the start-up pages for millions of people’s browsers.

One place to include in your strategy isn’t even a website – it’s a company called Inktomi that provides the search engine technology for some of the biggest search engines. Registering with Inktomi should be a part of your strategy if you want proper placement on MSN, Overture and LookSmart, among others.

Is Your Site Ready for Search Engine Optimization?

Before planning your optimization strategy, remember: top rankings go to the site that is best prepared. To be prepared, says Ashton, five critical elements must be in place:

1. Design – make sure it works for you. Search engine optimization must be a consideration in the design of your site. One of the most important elements of design, says Ashton, is to make sure to put no barriers of entry between yourself and your customers. Then, to really close the deal, your website has to be designed to impress not just your audience, but also the search engine editors. And during the initial design or redesign phases, Ashton says to remember that search engines hate “under construction” pages, so if your site is not ready yet, don't put one up.
2. Programming – the hidden factor. Because this is what really ties together your website, a few elements of programming deserve special attention. Databases have become extremely popular as an effective way to manage large web information assets. However, aside from cutting-edge search engines like Google, most search engines can't see into database-driven pages. Additionally, while Flash animation can be a compelling way to communicate your message, it causes similar indexing problems. In fact, pages created with Flash can be completely invisible to search engines if not properly created. To get these two types of pages noticed, Ashton recommends embedding your database and Flash elements into html pages that search engines can index. Another important element of programming is page creation. Because software-created pages often incorporate extra code which can delete the relevance of your keywords, Ashton recommends hand-coding whenever possible. He also discourages the use of frames because of indexing problems – and because they are poor design elements.
3. Content – is still king, and it must be compelling. Content is what creates and sustains the relationships you are trying to create and maintain online. Optimization success involves deploying more good content on more pages of your site so that the editors and search engines will consider you an important resource. Equally important are the return visitors that fresh content attracts. After all, what’s the point of coming back to a site that has stale or dated information?
4. Commitment – of the whole team. Everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the designers, must be committed to website success. They must all work together and understand the role that the website is to play in your communications strategy.
5. Popularity – it matters who your friends are. In the last few years, search engines like Google, Alta Vista and Teoma have begun ranking sites according to popularity, which is determined by how many other sites link to them. In the future, forming high-quality linking relationships with other websites may be crucial for attaining top positions on these engines. Content again comes into play in this area since linking partners will often review your content to decide whether a relationship is worthwhile. Another way to gain popularity is to pay for ads on other sites that link to you. You can buy friends, says Ashton, but you have to calculate the costs associated with this in the long run.

To Advertise or Optimize?

With the demise of the ‘free’ Internet, paying for placement on search engines is becoming increasingly popular. Many search sites are now moving toward the ‘pay-per-click’ advertising model, which places a website in the top search results for a price. Ashton considers this a poor strategy since most visitors want to look through real search engine results, not paid advertisements. In fact, the click-thru rates of top search engine matches are 10 times greater than those of top ads.

Additionally, the switch to paid listings can often move a search engine into the bottom tier of competitors. This may soon affect the significance of some previously interesting and dynamic search engines that have changed their business models. Excite and LookSmart have now become nothing more than paid advertising portals, WebCrawler is now using Overture’s paid listings, and Hotbot and Lycos results have become just a duplication of the Open Directory listings.

So which is better: spending money on advertisements or spending time on search engine optimization? The best approach may be to do both, says Ashton, and both approaches start with keywords.

Keywords Are Key

The URL and keywords you select determine, in large part, how search engines rank your site. In addition, most Internet searching is driven by the URLs and keywords people use to find the types of business they are looking for. So figuring out how people are searching and deciding on the right keywords should be a big part of your optimization strategy. This often involves analyzing your organization, your products or services, and your market.

Additionally, if you decide to pay for search engine placement, selection of the right keywords is critical. Buying the top single search term is not cost effective – and it’s also not necessarily a good strategy. A better approach would be to thoroughly understand the specifics about your product and the search behavior of the people who may be looking for you. Then you can determine the keywords that will direct the best audience to you for the lowest cost. Look for phrases that people use to get a deeper interest in what you do. For instance, while you could pay top dollar for the word ‘lawyer,’ realistically someone looking for a ‘Chicago securities lawyer’ is probably much more likely to be interested in your specific business. Remember, says Ashton, it’s preferable to win small frequently than to lose big.

Tricks and Snake Oil

Search engine success is not a matter of tricking and maneuvering, but rather of presenting your best foot forward, says Ashton. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. As for companies that promise cheap and easy search engine success, Ashton likens them to “snake oil salesmen.”

Companies that promise to submit your site to hundreds or thousands of search engines are using software to spam the search engines, and are likely to get your site banned from the ones that really matter, according to SEO Logic. Tactics like this, which previously were used to improperly influence search engines, can now actually get your site dropped from the results.

Similarly, trying to trick search engines by creating hundreds of “mirror pages,” with ads for your site or gateway pages that try to unduly influence specific search engines will eventually fail as well, says Ashton. Ultimately, he says, the only way to succeed is to deploy an effective website strategy that includes several basic steps:

1. Do keyword research to find out how your audience is looking for you.
2. Build the site carefully using clean html effectively deployed.
3. Manually submit your site according to rules of each search engine.
4. Have patience. It often takes search engines a long time to index sites and multiple submissions can actually hinder placement.
5. Create as many high-quality linking partnerships as possible.
6. Update your site at least once a week. Providing current and relevant information can earn you extra ranking points.
7. Set reasonable expectations and goals.
8. Get competent help.

Measuring Success

Certain tools can be helpful for measuring the success of your placement strategy. To check your ranking on major engines, Ashton recommends using a service or buying special software to generate placement reports for major search engines. You should also frequently check your web statistics tracking software to find out which sites are sending you the most traffic.

Additionally, you should keep up to date on the most recent search engine news and information. Two good starting points are SEO Logic’s Search Engine News and Search Engine Watch, a website that provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry, and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found. Links to both are included below. Use the information you gather to identify areas of weakness and modify your strategy.

Law Firm Strategies

While law firms can learn important lessons from search engine strategies designed for general websites, crafting an optimization strategy for a law firm may often involve unique considerations. For instance, law firms may benefit from targeting search engines that cater to the specific audiences that they want to reach. These include legal websites, portals and directories.

While the quantity of traffic that a firm receives from these sources may not be as significant, the increase in quality may be. The leading lawyer directory and search engine on the Internet is the Martindale-Hubbell law directory, used by lawyers at Martindale.com and by consumers at Lawyers.com. Additionally, Findlaw, Law.com, the ABA, and many state bars also have useful lawyer search engines.

Remember, successful search engine optimization is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. With billions of pages competing, top placement requires an effective strategy, an ongoing commitment, and some patience.

Useful SEO Links

• SEO Logic

• SEO Logic’s Search Engine Expert Page

• Yahoo’s non-refundable annual fee policy

• Complete list of sites using Open Directory data

• SEO Logic’s Search Engine News

• Search Engine Watch