High in the Rankings

Businesses are perpetually on the prowl for ways to drive more traffic to their Web sites without busting the marketing budget. Two of the most popular ways to do that are through search-engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising.

A study by Connecticut-based Jupiter Research, an Internet research firm, found that in 2006, 68 percent of executives plan to increase their spending on search-engine marketing. In addition, the number of Web advertisers reporting use of banner ads fell from 71 percent in 2004 to 69 percent in 2005, according to Jupiter.

But the practice of search-engine optimization—ensuring that your Web site is constructed in a way that produces the highest search-page rankings—has evolved considerably in recent years. Internet marketing experts say there are plenty of new tactics and developments to be aware of to get the best return on your optimization efforts and raise your Web site high in the rankings.

General terms tend to attract tire kickers; narrow terms bring in people further along in the purchasing cycle.

Identifying “Money Phrases”

“Natural” or “organic” search-engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising represent two different but complementary ways to ensure you’re getting more than just tire kickers on your Web site. Natural approaches focus on improving Web page content and increasing links from other sites to get your site into the coveted top rankings; with pay-per-click models, you bid for use of certain keywords on Google or Yahoo search engines. When companies win bids for keywords and those keywords are used in searches, an advertisement with a link to the company appears next to the search results. The company pays a fee each time a user clicks on the advertisement.

Natural optimization begins by zeroing in on the keywords that searchers most commonly use to arrive at your site, then building those words into strategic locations on the site so they are more easily found, interpreted, and indexed by search-engines “bots”—software tools designed to dig through data. Companies typically determine their most valuable keywords or “money phrases” by researching terms customers have used in recent searches. They do research using data-mining tools or databases such as Wordtracker —which shows keywords that were used for searches—and by studying target audiences’ search behaviors through focus groups and other tactics. 

“The idea isn’t to focus only on phrases that are the most popular, but rather those that are most relevant to your business,” says Lee Odden, president of TopRank Online Marketing, a search-engine optimization company in Minneapolis. While the generic term “office chair,” might get an office-furniture company ranked high on a Google search, visitors using the more specific “ergonomic office chair” may convert more readily into actual buyers.