Niche Info Online Business

Putting SEO into practice
SEO daunts many organizations because they get paralyzed by the number of things they could do, and do not know which two to three things they should do to drive the best results per engine. This is the big challenge organizations have -- the prioritization of the work and building that prioritization into the web management process. 

The study above suggests a solution to this problem. With empirical evidence on what drives SEO ranking results and understanding the differentiation by engine from operational website changes, large companies can ensure that results can be driven in the short term while their long-term continued improvement is also scheduled and managed.

Take "cheap airfare" again. For a travel company or an airline looking to optimize on this word, here is what the study would suggest for prioritization.

Focus first on content issues, meaning the usage of the word in the text on the pages in the site. These can be changed most rapidly by the agency or content managers and have a very significant effect on rank improvements. The study suggested the following:

• Adding the words "cheap airfare" to the URL of the page being ranked will have the most significant effect on driving Google ranking -- i.e., something like: www.companyname.com/cheapairfare.html.
  
• However, the study also showed that changes to the URL will have minimal effect on Yahoo ranking improvements. 
  
• On the other hand, Yahoo reacted very strongly to the emphasis of words like "cheap airfare" in the content text on the site -- i.e, when the word is displayed as cheap airfare, CHEAP AIRFARE or cheap airfare. This had a smaller effect on driving Google rankings.
  

Content issues are also relatively easy to syndicate across a large site, particularly when the issues are made available to content managers. A best practice can be given to always emphasize the usage of "cheap airfare" in text, and to design URLs with the most important keyword that will drive traffic conversions.

The second area of focus should be on the link strategy; however, this is less simple to execute en masse across a large site. It is the quality, not the quantity, of links that matters.

What is a "quality link?" It is a link from a site or page that has a Page Rank (a statistical measure of relevancy that is available from Google on various pages) greater than three. So the question becomes: How does an organization drive multiple web managers to build a small number of links from pages with Page Ranks greater than three and distribute this information efficiently? 

This is an area of intense study. There are very sophisticated ways to implement link building and a number of companies that specialize in this, both agencies and specialty consultants. For a large site, deploying these solutions can be cost prohibitive.

The above study suggests that building links from a series of authoritative sources such as .gov or .edu. for "cheap airfare" in order to get a link from the FAA would be highly valuable but very difficult. A link from .edu would be easier. Also, Technorati and del.icio.us sites are good places to start. In the study, Google reacted very significantly to sites with links from these sources, as did MSN, so this is a straightforward way to get sites started in an efficient way to build links. Again, one to two high quality links are better than 1,000 poor quality links, and Covario's study results strongly support this assertion. 

The final step is to address the technical structure. This is listed last because technical issues usually deal with fundamental technical construction issues around site design. Changing these in large organizations is highly non-trivial and takes time and planning.

Technical issues can also be the most egregious as they may fundamentally prevent the mechanisms used by the engines to organize information from working. However, the above study provides guidelines on efforts that can be prioritized for the IT department or the web management team on how to deal with site issues and drive better rankings. There are essentially two major issues:

• The first of these technical issues is URL structure. One of the components that the Center of Excellence must develop is a best practice on site URL structure. The Covario study showed that long URLs and URLs that use mechanisms to track visitors to the site (called dynamic parameters) confuse the engines and drive significant rank decreases on Google and MSN. Yahoo seems better able to deal with dynamic URLs.
  
• The second of these issues is how the navigation is constructed, as the search engines use this to figure out how to find content on the site. Use of Java or Flash for the navigation prevents search engines from finding content. This was completely consistent across all engines in the study and is binary, so it's either a catastrophic failure or it works. 
  

The technical issues are not term-specific. If there are technical issues, it will impact any keywords that an organization is trying to optimize, not just "cheap airfare."

What is important for a large organization is making sure that the business case for determining whether or not making changes to site structure is worthwhile, and that the right process can be developed by the SEO Center of Excellence. This is a change and very valuable in getting the appropriate attention and results from, what are usually, overburdened IT teams.

Conclusion
The rewards of building these processes are vast as more consumers use search engines to find information about their brands and services. A brand that does not do this can be assured its competitors will, thereby influencing consumers on brand choice through one of the fastest growing, most effective advertising media available. Establishing competitive advantage through SEO is no longer a luxury -- it has shifted from avant-garde to de rigueur.