Are you on top?
Making your web site SEO savvy

By Mario Altiery

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of balancing technical and marketing skills to produce a well thought out website that is search engine-friendly, ranks well for specific keywords and phrases, and is tailored to your target market. A subset of search engine marketing, SEO improves the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural"—also known as "organic" or "algorithmic"—search results. SEO marketing considers how search algorithms work and what typical web site visitors might search for, to help match them with sites offering what they are interested in finding.

SEO efforts are not necessarily noticeable and may involve optimizing a site's coding, presentation, and structure, or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other more noticeable efforts include developing page content that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines, but that also appeals to site users. In the world of franchising, one thing is certain: without SEO, you are disregarding potential customers and visitors because most of them will find their way to your competition. Although SEO is an ongoing process of refining and improving, ultimately your site should be within the first five or 10 listings of the search engine results page (SERP). If it is not, you can be certain that all your potential customers are finding their way to rival sites.

There are three different types of SEO. “On-page,” optimization, one of the main factors that influences search engine rankings, covers all the key elements of optimization. It includes a number of key factors including web pages with good content and good keyword density, website structure, and proper use of HTML attributes. “Off-page,” optimization relates to website linking and the external factors such as the number of links to the site that determine the ranking.
Using these off-page factors carefully and implementing them in the websites to achieve top ranking is a major task in off-page SEO. Some of the factors that are considered by the leading search engines to evaluate the off-page optimization include the type of websites that are linked to your website, number of sites and links, page title, and anchor text. “Off-page” social media optimization promotes by placing ideas within online communities with the hope that they will spread virally.

In order to generate significant web visibility, your site must aim to rank within the top 30 results, and for this to happen, your site needs to be SEO savvy. Despite this, according to a recent U.S. study, only 20 percent of all businesses outsource SEO programs to professional SEO firms. The remaining 80 percent either does not conduct search engine optimization at all, or they believe they have the resources and skills to implement these improvements in-house. Of this 80 percent, it is estimated that 90 percent of these companies cannot even be found on the web.
If your company is considering conducting your SEO program in-house, here are some questions to consider: who will be responsible for analyzing, developing, implementing and measuring the success of your SEO program? Is this considered the role of your IT department, marketing department, or other individuals within your company? Do they have the time, knowledge, and resources to successfully implement and maintain your search engine optimization program? And do they really care if these efforts work or not? There is more to SEO than most realize.
Professional SEO firms have dedicated resources and experience to support your company's web marketing initiatives so that your company can quickly and efficiently implement a successful SEO program based on franchise web marketing strategies that will attract your target market. By analyzing key words relevant to your industry—and the key words used by your competition—SEO experts identify the best mix of your industry’s keywords (and keywords used by your competitors) to include in your web site content, and develop the best structure for your site so that it leverages more franchise leads worldwide. This franchise marketing team should include: writers who are adept at providing quality content that is also optimized for relevant keywords; web developers who evaluate your web presence and provide SEO tips and tools for optimizing your current site locally and nationally, or make recommendations for rebuilding it (including graphics, navigation, and branding for immediate and long-term search results). Depending on the structure of your current site, a complete overhaul may be the most effective solution for optimizing an out-of-date site to obtain the maximum results.
What should the balance be between pay per click (PPC), portal and SEO be so that you get the biggest bang for the smallest marketing buck? While a web site marketing plan should consider a balance of paid and free search methods, web developers agree that the best franchise leads will always be the ones that come to you through your own site and ideally you should drive all your traffic through natural searches. According to Search Engine Guide, potential franchise buyers who find out about your franchising opportunities through Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN want to be driven to your site to hear your marketing message: you cannot find a more qualified franchise lead than that. It has also been found that organic search listings outperform PPC listings three to one and achieve higher conversion rates. In terms of cost advantages, SEO can be free if you have the skills and staff to do it yourself, or there are many reputable franchise web site marketing firms. PPC and portal will always have recurring costs, and PPC has unlimited possibilities, meaning it can be very costly if a monthly budget is not established and adhered to that considers a 12-month search placement strategy.
Ranking highly in organic searches will increase your organic leads and sales, making it one of the most cost effective marketing strategy investments you can make. If you are just starting out the SEO program, you should augment it with PPC and portal advertising while waiting for SEO results. PPC can also be used for new search phrases that may start to be prominent, but that have not yet been optimized.

As web site marketing grows as fast as the number of businesses seeking to improve their online presence, so do the myths and misconceptions about SEO. Promises of “instant traffic” or “millions of hits” sound too good to be true because they are.
White-Hat SEO is more labor-intensive and doesn't pay off as quickly, but as long as the big search engines want to encourage good habits, the more likely they are to be rewarded with traffic. Here are several SEO falsehoods to be aware of and avoid.

Changing your web site. Your web site should always be a work in progress because the Internet is constantly evolving. Browsers are frequently updated to support improved HTML, cascading style sheets, scripting, and multimedia files. If your site is not crawler-friendly, it will have to be modified to obtain search engine visibility. And if you have not written your site using the keyword phrases your target audience uses for search queries, your pages will not rank well. If you did use keyword phrases on your pages, make sure those phrases are used prominently and frequently enough so the pages appear focused from the crawler’s point of view and the visitor’s.

Guaranteed search engine positions. Except for pay-for-placement advertising, optimizers cannot guarantee top positions. Only one group has final control over
what ranks and what does not: the search engines themselves. All major search engines have some sort of disclaimer stating they ultimately decide which web pages will be included in their indexes, though that is not the case with most web sites. No SEO can guarantee or predict how often Googlebot or SLURP are going to crawl a web site. If quality SEO edits are made to a site's content, link structure and code, securing a good number of quality inbound links, it could be 30 days before the search engines detect and recognize those changes in a crawl. Submitting via Google sitemap and Yahoo sitemap will not necessarily speed up crawl frequency either, and tricks like spamming guest books, blogs and forums, and auto generating keyword optimized content from dictionary software take time to have an effect. For new sites, ranking high is tricky and to guarantee top 10 is nothing more than an empty promise. Good organic traffic starts slowly and grows with the site.

Permanent search engine positions. There's no such thing as a permanent top position. Positioning and traffic fluctuations are normal because new pages with unique content are constantly added to the Web, old pages are deleted or updated, and how pages and sites link to each other also changes. Search engine indexes constantly evolve, so the position will always fluctuate.

Overnight results. No one can guarantee good organic search results within 24 hours. The big players in search—Google, Yahoo, MSN—all take their time in indexing a site. Any form of SEO that talks of instant results will likely
provide only a short-term boost in traffic, and even worse will likely originate from shady techniques such as spam. As algorithms for detecting this kind of behavior become more advanced, this sort of promotion will become more and more likely to damage your long-term search engine prospects.

Submitting to search engines. The promise of having your site submitted to thousands of search engines is and empty promise. The search engine market is focused on Google, along with a few subsidiary search markets such as MSN and Yahoo. These big three account for 99 percent of all searches to your site and the others are barely mentioned in referral logs. Big search engines will more than likely already know about your site through back links, so the art of “search engine submission” is simply another myth.

More links, good links. Anyone who has ever dabbled in SEO knows that links are critical to rising up the rankings in organic search. Search engines have gotten smarter, though the key today is relevance. You may be able to quickly and easily assemble a lot of links on a lot of sites, but good links from “authority” sites within the same subject field are worth more in the long-term. Any popular and relevant site should be your target in terms of generating good links.

Instant link popularity. Anyone who promises link popularity is spamming search engines. SEO firms that promise instantaneous results build link farms to artificially inflate link popularity. Quite often, these firms rely on expired domains on Yahoo and Open Directory. Many of the link farm sites are not even in the same industry. Why would a mortgage site link to a site that sells watches?

Like all marketing tools and strategies, SEO is an ongoing investment. Whether you use in-house staff to oversee the process, or outsource it to a firm that specializes in web site marketing, 90 percent of these services are based on time: writing, analyzing, tweaking, optimizing, communicating and reporting. Depending on the size of your site—and your budget—after the initial investment, it is not unreasonable to spend anywhere from 10-40 hours a month on an optimization campaign, including keyword research, page optimization, usability and conversion analysis and reporting, and link building and link research, and general campaign management. While the number of hours it takes to accomplish this can seem overwhelming, purchasing an SEO package is a critical tool for attracting new customers from your target market.

Mario Altiery is President and CEO of Upside Group, an award-winning franchise marketing consulting group.