The online world’s loyalty to search engines continues unabated.  The majority of web users use search engines to find what they need online.  Google and Yahoo remain the key engines in Europe, with AOL and MSN making up the lion’s share of search activity in the US.  How can you be sure that you use maximise search engines to drive the right traffic to your website?

The cliché is as old as the web itself, but it is one of the few truisms to remain post the Dot Com boom and bust.  Launching a website which no one can find is like printing 10,000 company brochures and locking them in a cupboard.  And if I might stretch it further, building a site which attracts the wrong audience is like sending those 10,000 brochures to 10,000 random people, with no follow up.

The web now contains billions of pages, and each day millions of new pages are added to it.  Without searching and structure, these pages are like a flat un–navigable wasteland.  With websites which are written in a search friendly fashion, the web suddenly realises structure, and layout, and street maps and navigability.  With sites authored with the user in mind, good search engine performance will follow.  This means that you will get the right audience to the right place (your content) at the right time.

Because of the importance of searching, a website’s search engine performance should be part of any build project mix from day one, it shouldn’t be a bolt on or an afterthought once a site is developed.  Optimising search engine performance is an issue which will influence your site’s design, its technology, its content, imagery and programming code.

Because search engine issues are so all encompassing, there is no magic wand solution, which will make it all better.  Unpopular as it is to say, there’s nowhere you can go to become number 1 in Google for all your requested search terms and key phrases.  Enjoying optimal search engine performance for your site is a lifetime’s work, a work which should be jointly undertaken between you and your web company.

In practical terms there are a number of priorities you should establish early on to be sure of optimum site performance:

• This will ensure that you exclude neither users with disability, nor search engines.

• Embrace the design of successful e–commerce companies – their designs are the result of research.  Your users want simple usable interfaces.

• This is the bedrock upon which all other content is viewed.  But 80% of websites don’t even write it.  I’ll be covering this in more depth in next month’s article.

• Get linked from the right sites, as search engines seek to work out what you site is about both from your content, and from the content of sites which link to you.  Establish relevant links with like minded sites, industry bodies, customers / suppliers / whomever.  The only criteria is that they are relevant.

• Links should be internal as well as external.  Label your links well and ensure that there are multiple routes to the same information on your site.  Search engine spiders, and users alike will thank you for this one.

There is no easy answer to optimum search engine performance.  But with a user focussed, content centred approach to web publishing, a good search engine strategy can bring significant return on investment, and remains one of the most effective methods to market companies in many sectors.  Over the next months I’ll outline exactly how you can apply the theory to your business, regardless of its scale or sector.