Importance of Search Engine Optimisation

Not surprisingly, an increasing number of Indian businesses are waking up to the potential of promoting their web sites, products and services through search engines.

As the number of internet users in India explodes – the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) estimates that there will be 42m users online by March 2007 against the 37m in September 2006 – few marketers can ignore search engines. 

So, what are the ways in which Indian companies can use search engines to promote their web sites, brands, products and services?

The two most common ways to leverage search engines are:

· Search Engine Optimisation

· Search Engine Advertising

In this article, we will take a quick look at what search engine optimisation is and why it is important.

Search engine optimization is a process by which you ensure that your web site ranks among the first few results of a search engine when an Internet user searches using keywords that are important to your business. For example, if you are offshore application Development Company, your site should be displayed prominently on search engine result pages if a user searches for application development outsourcing. 

Unlike other forms of online advertising, search engines deliver highly targeted traffic. When people use search engines, they are actively seeking information on products, services or companies. In that sense, traffic coming to your site from search engine result pages are pre-qualified leads (that is: they have a stated interest in what you have to offer), and more likely to convert into customers than, say, those coming to your site from a banner ad. 

There are many other reasons why a prominent ranking on search engines is critical to the success of your web site.

There are billions of pages on the Internet. Finding a web site, in the absence of a search engine, would be akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. Not surprisingly, countless studies have shown that a majority of online users, anywhere between 70% to 85%, find web sites through search engines. So, if your site does not figure on search engine results, it’s as good as not existing at all.

In addition, very few users go beyond the first page of results on a search engine to find what they are looking for. Over 50% of Internet users abandon their searches after the first two pages of results. What this means is that if your site is not on the first two pages of search engine results, you stand to lose almost 50% of prospective visitors to your site.

So, the question is what does it take to rank on the first few pages of a search engine like Google or Yahoo?

Contrary to what many people think, building search-engine friendly sites does not involve abandoning good usability practices. In fact, most user-friendly sites will be search-engine friendly and vice versa. The goals of search-engine friendliness and user-friendliness need not be mutually exclusive.

Before we look at how you can get your site to rank in the first few pages of search engine results, let’s quickly look at how search engines rank pages. Search engines use a variety of factors to determine which pages are most important to a user’s query, but two of the most important are content (keywords) and the number and quality of inbound links (link popularity).

Content (keywords): The text content on a page is one of the ways a search engine can tell what your site is about. To put it simplistically, if a user searches for 5-megapixel digital camera, a search engine, other things being equal, will rank those pages higher that…

· … have a higher concentration of the phrase 5-megapixel digital camera (be wary of this though, search engines may treat pages that have a rather abnormal concentration of a single phrase as spam)

· … have the phrase displayed in prominent areas (page headings, page titles, sub-headings, etc)

· … are part of a site that is thematically in line with the phrase (for instance, a page on a digital camera portal may rank higher than a page on a automobile portal even if the latter has a higher concentration of the key phrase)

Inbound links: Since content by itself is easy to manipulate by spammers (through a process of keyword stuffing), search engines evolved a system of ranking pages by the quality and number of inbound links they attract. In essence, search engines treat every inbound link to your site as a vote for your site. However, it is not a sheer numbers. Search engines also look at the quality of sites linking to you to avoid manipulation by unscrupulous webmasters.

Of course, search engine ranking is a far more complex process and search engines evaluate a number of other factors. We will look at them in our next article: How to optimize your site for search engines and how businesses can incorporate SEO into their online marketing mix.

- Prashant Deorah

CEO, Puretech Internet Pvt. Ltd.