Understanding search engines (feedback)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

November 19, 2005 [2540 views]

Another good turnout this week with 95 students taking part in the activity. It was the hardest yet and the range of answers indicates different levels of understanding. I hope that this feedback will help some of clarify your thinking. Please ask questions here if things are unclear or do a bit more research online.

Choice of companies for the case study

Between you, you have a good range of smaller, medium and a few large businesses. Those of you tackling very large businesses have generally made a special case through work or personal connections. Remember to make your lives easier by selecting companies whose ecommerce activities clearly need major improvements.

Existing keywords

I asked you to consider which words the site would probably score highly for within the search engines. Most of you used some of the “keyword density” tools online to evaluate the current home page and discover the words that were included. Not surprisingly for most sites these included the company name and some others. Other indications of possible high scoring keywords would include the page title and perhaps the META tags (although these are not prioritised by most search engines because they are easy to manipulate).

Most of you seem to understand that when you use the keyword analysis tools you find that some words and phrases have a higher occurrence than others. These frequently occurring phrases are likely to be the ones for which the site is ranked more highly in search results.

Desired keywords

The heart of this exercise was to get you thinking about the difference between the keywords a site wants and the keywords for which a site can achieve a high search engine position. They are not the same.

Some of you have identified keywords that are so general that it is unlikely that these will ever be successful: computer, mobile phone, jeans, men, music, cheap travel, sports, high tech, football.

Companies will find it impossible to rank for sites where there are thousands or millions of competitors. Before you decide which words to promote, just check to see how many other sites you would have to rank above. Football for example, returns 239 million pages. Don’t be silly!

Which words are likely to be successful?

When selecting keywords you want to find words that are sufficiently targeted that they relate to the site you are promoting and sufficiently in demand (by searchers) to drive traffic to the site.

I suggest that you look for 2 and 3-word phrases that are specific to the company that you are investigating. “web design London” is a highly successful phrase for the OTHER media because it is what we do and people are searching for it. It is much more successful than any of the following: web, design, “web design” or London. No-one who types London into a search engine expects to find our company so we don’t want to focus our efforts on trying to rate highly for that single word.

Your answers to the question “which keywords are likely to be most successful?” suggest that some of you have not thought about this issue sufficiently. Ask questions if you are still unclear. Football will never be a successful keyword (on its own) unless you are FIFA, Adidas or some other site with a huge reputation (page rank 9 or above).

Defining PageRank

Some of you can search! And you found some good definitions for PageRank. That’s fine as long as you read what you find and understand it.

PageRank is a measure of online reputation calculated by Google from the number of links pointing at a particular page weighted by the reputations of the pages that are linking. It is calculated periodically and forms the basis for ordering search results (although the complete Google algorithm is a closely guarded secret).

Some of you have really not got this at all: “it is how often people browse the site”, “it is based on traffic”, “it shows what rank number it is on”, “seems to be average”, “a website that is frequently used”, “its about keywords”. These are all wrong!

You need to understand what PageRank is for your case study company and its competitors and be able to make a good case for why effort needs to be made to improve it. Look at the inbound links, look at the number of them and look at their “quality”.

Note that a company can have a well known brand, a huge offline reputation and still have a very poor online reputation (indicated by a lower than their competitors PageRank).

Improving PageRank

A few good answers and but some terrible ones. Here are some of the terrible ones first:

“Link to other websites such as ebay and amazon”
“promote its products so that more people will visit the page”
“have more offers”
“advertise”
“add more pages – the more pages a site has the higher the PageRank”
“add more keywords”
“add meta tags”
“start selling plants on-line”
“change the page titles”
“change the colour of the website”
“be higher in the search listings”
“use more pop-ups” (!)

I did NOT ask you how to improve the search engine rankings for this site but simply how to improve PageRank. Always read the question carefully. This question was deliberately explicit. To improve the traffic on an existing site, first we need to improve its reputation (measured by PageRank) and then we need to optimise it in other ways. Some of the answers above were fine for the second task but they will not help the first. These will:

“get listed in high ranking directories” (which ones?)
“trade links with industry related sites” (which ones?)
“comment on blogs and forums leaving your URL behind”
“get linked from other high PageRank sites”

Questions you raised during the activity

What happens if the site we are studying gets relaunched?

If this happens before Christmas then consider changing company. You make your life difficult if the new site is very good. Your research will not be wasted if you choose another company in the same area.

What is a “landing page strategy”?

Optimising the home page of a site for all sensible keywords is impossible because optimising for one is likely to reduce the effectiveness for another. Many companies (and certainly the ones we design) use a landing page strategy in which different entry pages (or landing pages) are created for each area of the business and these are then optimised for different groups of keywords. This is a fundamental change for many brands who assume that the visitor will come in through the front door of the home page. You need to think carefully about the “customer journey” if visitors come in through lots of different landing pages to make sure that each of these journeys makes sense.

How does this relate to the exam?

All of this preparatory work relates directly to the exam because you will be asked how your case study site should be improved. The specific questions will not be revealed until the actually exam (hence broad preparation is required). However there are no tricks – you will simply be asked to focus on a subset of the issues we have been raising during the module. Practice the material covered here, understand the feedback, rethink your own answers and you will be well prepared for the exam.

What is a crawler?

A search engine spider or crawler is a software program that reads pages from the web, indexes their content in a database and follows links within these pages to other pages before repeating the process. If you are interested in writing one here is some pseudo code from Sun

If the site has no rankings and no traffic can we still use it for the case study?

There are many reasons for no rankings and no traffic and these include very new sites (check with NetCraft), no in-bound links (check with AllTheWeb), Flash sites (although Flash can be used well within well ranked sites), banned sites (Google and MSN ban sites that break their rules) and poorly designed sites. Alexa and TrafficEstimate will indicate no traffic when the traffic is low rather than zero because of the way they estimate traffic.

Of course you can use these sites if you think you can make a difference to their business online.

Can I approve your case study site?

No. As I have explained before choosing a site is part of the case study.

When I type in a keyword my chosen site comes up in the sponsored right hand side links on Google. Will you be covering this?

Yes. Next week. These results are paid for advertising and are not affected by PageRank. They are affected, as we will see, by keywords.

Will we get individual feedback?

No. It already takes about 3 hours a time to provide this feedback and I hope this is actually more useful because you get to read comments about other people’s work. Of course you can ask questions at the end of this to clarify your thinking,

When is the exam?

Not my call I am afraid but some time towards the beginning of January. They are set centrally by the university and you will be informed by the school office.

Identifying keywords and competitors is a pain!

It is! But it is really important for you and for your clients (and future employers). The tools are getting better but there are no quick short cuts. This is the process we go through:

1. Brainstorm keywords and competitors with client
2. Look at match between desired keywords and actually keywords on site
3. Consider landing page strategy
4. Look at competitors who rank highly for desired keywords
5. Look at how well desired keywords actually target the type of business the client does
6. Look at the other keywords the competitors have on their sites (high keyword density)
7. Consider whether these keywords are worth adding to our list of desired words
8. Look at inbound links of high ranked competitors to find directories where you can be listed (to improve reputation)
9. Improve content to improve keyword density for desired keywords (on landing pages)
10. Repeat, measure, repeat, repeat

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