Many Web sites live and die by whether people can reliably find them via natural search.
The daunting statistics: More than 80% of people find Web sites using a search engine. Over 70% of those searchers click on natural search results, 30% on paid search results. Furthermore, 71% click on the top 5 links, 87% on the first page of links only. (Thanks, Forrester and Nielsen.)
Given natural search’s importance and that improving results is relatively manageable and inexpensive, it’s natural to wonder why so many sites still miss the mark.
There’s no magic fix for better search results. Rather, it requires a commitment to planning, detail and writing to make a huge difference.
Better search takes time.
Better search results don’t happen overnight. It takes time and solid planning to establish your rankings and keep them there. To borrow and twist a time-honored phrase, if you’re not planning for better natural search results, you’re planning to fail.
Setting up your site to be search-friendly is your first best move. One fundamental is often an overlooked issue: Make sure your Web design team works with search optimization experts. It’s not impossible to build an attractive, highly functional Web site that is search-engine friendly. It just won’t happen on its own.
By disregarding search in the design process, you’re ensuring a time-consuming post-launch fix of improved page titling, URL restructuring, and meta data and tagging adjustments. The failure to consider search not only wastes time and money, it delays strong search rankings for months and months.
Flash sites are particularly problematic for search results. While Flash is great for visual sizzle, search engines can’t easily index the contents inside a Flash file, so most engines see a big fat nothing when they crawl the file. One common fix is to add search-optimized HTML content in a placeholder <div> (a tag that defines a division or section in an HTML document) that the search engine can use to index from.
Content rules. So do tags.
Search engines use content to develop results, so content is king. However, great content without proper tagging is asking for trouble. Get the basics right when optimizing your tags and results will follow.
Quick tagging guidelines:- For title page content, identify the company or brand clearly, use separators (hyphens or vertical lines) to break up parts of the title, and put keywords into the title when possible. Eliminate non-ASCII characters and limit your titles to roughly 60-70 characters.
- Make meta descriptions succinct (20–30 words) and loaded with keywords. Write them as if real people are reading them.
- Since headers are given more priority than body copy by search engines, make sure they’re descriptive and include keywords.
Keep content fresh.
Search engines love fresh content. Too often, companies build a new site, take it live and then schedule a refresh two years down the road. Big mistake. Stale content tells search engines that there’s no reason to revisit or re-rank the site.
Find ways to keep content flowing to your site. Fresh content not only creates a better user experience, it encourages search engines to visit often. One way to keep your content fresh is to build news, reviews and blogs into your site architecture.
Be social.
Not to be forgotten is the need to optimize your site for social media. Search engines see incoming links to your Web site as a seal of approval for the contents within. Using social media to drive inbound links is a tried-and-true technique for ramping up traffic, albeit not necessarily targeted traffic.
Make sure your site is connected to online communities and community Web sites. Methods vary, but consider RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogs and other social community tools. Adding common buttons to your site — such as Mixx it!, Stumble it!, Digg this! and Add to del.icio.us — deliver traffic and increase your linkability.
Get linked.
Incoming links are also critical to great natural search results. Making this happen takes time and requires a concerted effort at encouraging other relevant sites to link to you. Aim for one-way links with large sites, as they carry more weight in rankings.
An example: T3's college.gov site, developed recently for the U.S. Department of Education, has risen to #4 in Google natural search in part because over 1,000 sites link to it, enhancing other optimization elements we effectively applied to the site.
Consider 508.
One underappreciated way to make your site more optimized for natural search is to build it compliant with the 1992 Americans With Disabilities Act's Section 508, a law that requires federal agencies’ electronic and information technology be accessible to people with disabilities. Oddly enough, one byproduct of making your site more accessible for disabled users is that that it also ends up being intensely optimized for search spiders.
There are different levels of compliance with Section 508. Even minor efforts in that direction can pay huge dividends. A more comprehensive approach, like our fully compliant college.gov site, is a high standard, but you can expect a two-for-one reward: the customer benefit of addressing disabled users, and the business benefit of generating better search results.
Cover the basics.
In addition to the aforementioned, some basics shouldn’t be ignored.
Make sure your site is properly indexed, meta data is polished for top-tier pages, and each page has relevant content and a unique page title. You’ll want descriptive page titles that include keywords that your site analytics software says people are using in their searches. If possible, employ simple-to-follow URLs that the search engine can easily read. Be sure your navigation and calls to action are descriptive and include keywords.
A new and increasingly important aspect of search is image search. To make sure your images come up in image-related searches, you’ll need to label them, which is already considered a best practice for optimizing for disability readers.
Results count, naturally.
Although paid search should never be overlooked as a way to grab your share of search traffic, optimizing for natural search results is a great long-term, almost free solution. The nearly instant, highly targeted traffic that comes from paid search traffic can’t be duplicated by natural search, but the long-term free flow of interested viewers coming from a well-optimized site is more efficient and cost effective.
Have your doubts about the importance of natural search? The next time you do a search, pay attention to your own behavior. What link will you click on? Statistics say it will be the first unpaid link. It’s only natural.
Ready to learn more about natural search? T3’s Anna Russell and Chris Wooster have practical, easy-to-implement presentations to share.
Anna Russell and Chris Wooster contributed to this article.
