First published January 2006 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers.

What is search engine optimisation?

Search is big business – the driver of e-commerce. In the early days of the web most users used portal sites and directories to navigate their way to what interested them. Today the web is so vast and users’ needs so precise that most use search to find what they want.

Research shows that most users don’t look past the first two or three pages of results returned by a search engine, so it is critical to boost your site’s ranking, as otherwise you are all but invisible to those who don’t already know you. How can this be achieved?

There are broadly two ways to increase your site’s visibility in search engines:

• Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of analysing your website and individual pages and then adjusting content and design to achieve top search engine rankings.
• Keyword advertising (not covered here) is the display of your advertisements on results pages, triggered when keywords you have “purchased” are used in a search.

While search engine optimisation involves time and effort and hence cost, the resulting click-throughs to your site are free. Keyword advertising on the other hand can involve little effort (though if done properly it will take time) but incurs cost-per-click. These costs-per-click are small (except for very high-demand keywords), but can mount up to a significant spend – and are now producing huge revenues for the search engines.

This article seeks to explain the concepts and guide you through the basics of search engine optimisation. This is, necessarily, a somewhat technical topic, but the intention has been to present the information in a way that is understandable to decision makers, who will then be in a better position to brief their webmasters.

There are at least 60 sites that offer full internet search but the vast majority of searches are handled by Google, Yahoo and MSN Search and you can concentrate on just these three. As well as their main (.com) sites, they also operate local (.co.uk) search sites. In analysing your rankings for particular searches it is recommended you use the UK search sites, and select the “UK pages” option as this reduces the number of competing results and identifies more clearly where you stand in relation to your UK competition.

A typical search engine results page is divided into distinct areas, generally as follows:

• Logo and search box at the top
• Sponsored results at the top and also down the right hand side
• Organic (natural) results, down the main left hand area of the page, each consisting of title, description (or excerpt) and URL.

Search engine optimisation is concerned with improving your organic or natural ranking, ie the results returned from the search engine’s web crawl index. These are the most important and prominent results on the page but, increasingly, there is competition on the page from sponsored results returned from the search engine’s advertisements index. Indeed, according to one report, only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results and only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not.

Is your site search engine friendly?

The first step in analysing your site’s performance in the search engines is to determine to what extent they are indexing your pages. To find all the pages on your site that are in a search engine’s index, enter your domain name in each search box in turn, in the form: site:yourdomain.co.uk. How do the results compare with your expectations? If your site is not indexed at all by a particular search engine, proceed post haste to submit your site to it. This is free, but does not guarantee whether or within what timeframe the search engine will start to index your pages.

In fact the search engines will usually start to index your site more quickly if it is linked from any existing page in their indexes, so now is the time to start your link-building campaign (referred to more fully later).

Problem pages

Next, do the search engines return far fewer results than you would expect? This will be the case if they can’t or won’t follow all of your links. If your site suffers from one of the following, discuss the problem immediately with your webmaster to see how it can best be resolved.

Your site uses frames

A framed page consists of several separate pages displayed concurrently in different frames on the main page (frameset): typically, for example, a header, a menu and a main document.

Some search engines fall at the first hurdle, having trouble accessing the individual pages via the frameset. If they can access them, they will generally index them separately, so they appear out of context. And if the main content pages do not include menus, the other pages on your site may effectively be inaccessible to the search engine.

Your site uses dynamic pages

A dynamic page is a page that compiles the displayed content of the page based on instructions inside the page, typically pulling in information held in a database. The URL of a dynamic page will look something like this: http://www.widgets.co.uk/products/product.asp?id=2345.

Search engines used to have problems following dynamic page links. That is not the case today, but they are picky about following them as they may lead to many hundreds of almost identical pages; or the URL may be subject to change or include a unique session identifier. As a rule of thumb, the longer and more complex the parameters at the end of the URL, the less likely the pages are to be indexed.

Your site uses JavaScript menus

JavaScript is a computer language that is widely used on web pages to add functionality. Most commonly it is used to generate navigational menu structures. The problem here is that search engines can’t read JavaScript and thus can’t follow the menu links. The solution is to provide static menus at the foot of the appropriate pages.

Targeting keywords

Although there are site-wide changes you can make to all pages to improve your general rankings, search engine optimisation is primarily concerned with optimising individual pages so that they rank highly in response to particular search terms. Your task is to determine which words are most commonly used in searches for the services you offer (keywords) and then to target the most likely combinations of those words (key phrases). It is difficult to achieve high rankings for wider search terms, so you will need to target more specific terms.

If you offer a range of services, you should optimise the main section pages describing each of those services. Within those service areas you may offer particular specialisms or there may be particular aspects that you cover on separate pages; you should optimise each of these pages for the more specific terms. For example if you are solicitors undertaking personal injury work, you should optimise your personal injury main section page for appropriate phrases related to personal injuries; and if you have particular expertise, say, with DVT claims, you should optimise the DVT page for phrases related to DVT.

Compile a list for each product/service type and each specialism of all the search terms you think your target audience might use in seeking those services. Brainstorm with your colleagues, read correspondence from your clients, read the press directed at your potential clients, visit your competitors’ websites.

Use a service such as Wordtracker, or Yahoo or Google’s keyword tools, to help you think about keywords. They suggest alternatives that are most commonly used in practice. Rationalise your terms into two or three word key phrases: research shows that this is the most common number of words used in search terms. Then prioritise the phrases in the list.

Now test each key phrase on your site using the search term site:yourdomain.co.uk key phrase. This will show you how the pages on your site rank for that key phrase and the results may surprise you. Examine the pages that already rank highly and decide which you should optimise.

Writing content for the web

At this point it may be tempting to head for the next section and dive straight into optimising your pages. But consider first that the search engines are trying to determine which pages are the most relevant and important for a given topic. Although it may appear that they are writing the rules for what is a good web page, in fact they are attempting to reduce well-established criteria to a “calculation” they are able to perform. So you will make a good start to optimising your pages by firstly ensuring your page content follows established good web journalistic practice:

• Use a short high-impact title.
• Provide a concise, descriptive introduction.
• Provide textual substance.
• Do not use images in place of text.
• Use short sentences and short paragraphs.
• Break up the text with clear subheadings.
• Include references to supporting sites and pages.
• Provide a concise conclusion.

More …

The full Search Engine Optimisation artcle is available on request from Nick Holmes – see the infolaw Search engine marketing marketing page.