Last month I wrote about the online advertising practice of paid search. As I alluded to in that column, and that you may have found out if you have looked into it on your own, it can be a really expensive endeavor, and accurately measuring the success or the ROI of all that advertising spending can be a headache.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to get people to your site without having to spend all that money? The good news is that there is a way. It’s known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You should have noticed that frequently during past columns (such as the design, development, and merchandising columns) I’ve already made mention of SEO. The reason for doing that is because to do SEO right, you need to design your site from the ground up with optimization in mind. The next series of columns will now go into the nuts and bolts of actually bringing all that SEO stuff together.
Just like some of my other columns that deal with stuff that has a strong technical underpinning, it’s going to take more than one issue to get through it all because it’s important to understand the why’s of SEO as well as the what’s because it’s the why’s that will most likely drive the how’s.
Just to get my bona fides out of the way; feel free to Google “BMW Motorcycle Parts” or “BMW Motorcycle Accessories” or even model specific stuff like “BMW R1150RT Parts.” That’s the site I run (A&S BMW Motorcycles) at the top. It’s been in the #1 position for 3 years running for just about every permutation of BMW Motorcycling related keywords you can throw at it, and if we’re not at the #1 position, we’re in the top 5. We’ve even been above the BMW corporate site for the search of “BMW Motorcycles” (BMW makes special effort now to see that doesn’t happen anymore!).
All of this is all so vitally important because when most people are looking for something online, they typically start at one of the major search engines like Google (the 800 pound gorilla), Yahoo, Ask, and so on. Each search engine has it’s own methods of “discovering” websites (typically known as spidering where an automated web surfing program called a robot just goes from page to page, indexes what it finds on that page and follows all the links that it finds to the next set of pages, over and over, and over again) and of sending back a series of pages ranking the return results (known as the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs) when you enter a search term.
When companies talk about how well their business does with regards to SEO, they use a term called organic results. That term is used to separate how visible they are based on the pure search results vs. any type of paid search campaign that they may be running at the time, not if they use pesticides or keep their chickens in tiny cages. Everyone wants to have good organic results for the primary search terms that describe their business. Or more correctly, they want to rank at the top of the SERPs for the keywords that their customers are searching for. That can be a huge distinction when it comes down to the difference between just driving traffic to your site, and driving shoppers to your site.
One thing that you need to keep in mind as you launch your site is that even if you do a perfect job with your SEO efforts, it is going to take a while for your stuff to show up at all, let alone near the top. New sites are hard to find. It’s going to take a while for the search engines to find you (all major search engines have a registration process where you can request yo have your site indexed), and even after you are indexed, you may end up spending several months in a type of limbo while you are deemed a worthy site and not just some fly-by-night scam site (this limbo in Google’s case is called the Sandbox. This sandbox, unlike the one’s from your ill-spent youth, is not fun to be in).
Propeller-head alert!
From an informational standpoint the Holy Grail for the web would be something called the Semantic Web. This mythical beast would function in such a way that when an author creates a site, they could tag the site, a page on the site, or even a term on the page, in such a way that it removes all ambiguity related to what the content is about, and the search engines would not have to essentially guess how to index the site. It would add a layer of intelligence to all of the pure data out there and theoretically allow much better search engine results.Unfortunately there’s a huge number of complete scammers out there that are more interested in pushing adult toys, Mexican Viagra, and naked pictures of Paris Hilton that would stop at nothing to cram as much semantic information that has nothing to do with the crap they are selling but would yield high search results just to get people to their site.
It’s primarily because of scammers that semantic information (you’ll hear terms like META data, keywords, descriptions, etc.) is virtually ignored today by all major search engines and they instead have to rely on keyword pattern matching, relevance ranking, as well as other more complicated algorithms that analyze intrasite as well as intersite link structures to determine at best worth, and at worst (and most typically) popularity. Yes that stuff sounds complex ( What do you think all those multiple PhD’s do all day at Google?), but if you want to get your site on top and make bags of money you’re going to need to understand it.
Now that I’ve laid out the landscape a little bit so that you have some context, in the end, it all boils down to content! Content is king. And like your mother used to say, it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that makes it really important. The next column I’ll teach you how to speak in a language and syntax that the robots can understand. Domo arigato Mr. Roboto!
Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Search Engine Optimization, selling-online, SEO
