Conspire to climb

With their impenetrable algorithms and immense commercial power, what do
the major search engines resemble if not fickle, inscrutable gods? And
in that context, don't the desperate efforts of organic search
specialists to second-guess their machinations start to look rather like
modern-day sacrifices?

But though organic/natural search/SEO still contains many mysteries, we
do seem to be moving into an age of enlightenment, where there are
certain basic pieces of wisdom we can all hold to be true. Keep your
website content and link strategy up to date, pay attention to social
media and tactical paid search and you are already well on your way,
with not a drop of sacrificial blood spilt.

"Natural search has been demystified a lot," says Jonty Kelt, managing
director of Google-owned digital marketing specialist, DoubleClick
Performics International. "Paid search has been taken up much more
quickly because it easier to understand, but natural search is a growth
story."

There are those who remain sceptical about organic search, or at least
about those who believe they have cracked it. The time it takes, the
unpredictability of the medium and the questionable credibility of many
self-described experts all strike an underwhelming note with
ChannelAdvisor UK managing director, James Scott. "SEO is often
something of an inexact science, and the industry has attracted a number
of snakeskin oil-sellers who promise the world and deliver very little"
he says. "It can take weeks or even months for an SEO campaign to come
to fruition."

Even advocates of the medium are obliged to concede that SEO can be hard
to justify in budgetary terms. "Paid is still what people concentrate on
more than organic, partly because, with paid search, you can sit down
and say: 'Here is a budget, let's go out and do this'," says Conrad
Bennett, technical services director of WebTrends. "Paid gives you
direct results you can more easily see."

Going organic

But there are impressive numbers to support the case for organic search,
as well. Studies point to the fact that an advertiser present in both
rankings can expect only a small proportion of clicks to come from paid
search. JupiterResearch goes as far as to estimate that 87 per cent of
clicks derive from organic search, and this message seems to be coming
through.

Google, unsurprisingly, towers over this space. In November 2007,
google.co.uk and google.com accounted for 86.2 per cent of all web
searches in the UK - a solid increase on their November 2006 position,
when they powered 78 per cent of searches (source: Hitwise).

To give a further sense of scale, if the mooted Microsoft/Yahoo! tie-up
had happened to be finalised last November, figures from the same source
show that their combined UK share of search would have been a hardly
Google-threatening 5.1 per cent.

It is no wonder, then, that SEO specialists continue to spend an
inordinate amount of time attempting to divine the logic by which Google
creates its rankings. Though Google denies it, for instance, there is a
widespread suspicion that investing in paid search will improve a
company's organic ranking. Easier to prove is the notion that frequent
content updates represent one of the most powerful ways to promote a
site.

Fresh and new

"It has become apparent lately that Google is favouring new sites a lot,
and sites with new content," says Darren Jamieson, content editor at
Manchester-based Just Search. "If you have got a site that does car
leasing, and someone is looking for something on the new Audi R8, a site
that hasn't been updated for three months won't come up, even if it has
a page on the R8."

Google itself, while cagey about its methods, is happy to confirm this
much. "We always say, build things for the people you want visiting your
site, and that is what we try to reflect with our ranking," says Google
spokesman Anthony House. "It is not about trying to trick your way into
the highest results."

Indeed, Google's advice for improving a company's organic ranking all
relates to the kind of housekeeping that makes a website visitable in
the first place.

"There are some tried-and-true methods: make sure your content is
unique, make sure you update it regularly," says House. "But these are
the things that make websites compelling to their visitors anyway. No
one wants to visit a site more than once if the information is stale,
and I guess that is sort of our over-arching, perennial SEO
message."

For a company that famously cloaks its most potent commercial weapons in
the utmost secrecy - these being its legendary algorithms - Google is
cheerily free with useful tips for those who would optimise their site
for search. Recently, for instance, it has been actively endorsing the
use of Sitemaps as the best way to alert search engines to the key parts
of a site.

"Webmasters submit an index of their site so that our crawler knows all
the pages the site owner wants us to search," says House of the
Google-/Yahoo!-/MSN-developed system. "You can submit your Sitemap to
Google through Webmaster Central, or you can put it on the root
directory of your website, and that way all the major search engine
crawlers can find it."

Another tip House volunteers is that companies might like to focus their
search on a handful of well-linked pages. "One thing a lot of people
don't seem to know is that page ranking is page specific, not site
specific," he says. "They don't necessarily need every page on their
site to be extremely high in the page ranking - just the ones they want
to get people to."

Google denies that advertisers will have more luck with their organic
links if they spend on PPC campaigns, but there are many who believe a
mixed strategy remains the best one, using the increasingly expensive
sponsored listings to generate momentum while the cheaper natural
results are gradually building up traction. "The key thing is to adjust
your campaign as you go," says Tamar search director, Neil Jackson. "If
you are a travel site and you are not ranking well for cheap flights
organically, you can use PPC tactically to pick up the traffic you are
not getting. If, after a while, you start to rank better for cheap
flights, you switch your PPC budget into the more niche terms - 'cheap
flights to Alicante', 'cheap flights to Florida', that sort of
thing."

Another reliable principle is the one dictating that companies need to
start thinking about search before they have laid the first digital
brick of a new website. "The main thing is to ensure the site is set up
correctly, that the architecture is good, that the site can be crawled
and indexed by the search engines," says Jackson. "We always say,
broadly speaking, that about 40 per cent of the work is on site and
about 60 per cent is off site."

Companies who enlist a web designer with no knowledge of search are
making the first and biggest possible mistake, argues Barry Mills,
chairman of web design and online marketing consultancy Netstep. "It is
unbelievable how many people build a website and then go to an SEO
specialist," he says. He likens it to building a roof and putting in the
walls later.

Once the architecture and the indexation are sound, the remainder of the
work begins and, by common consent, this part of the job never really
ends. The challenge divides itself into two parts: content and
linking.

As Google makes clear and most clued-up companies have learned, the
watchword for content must be freshness, combined with a commitment to
ensuring that the content matches the keywords that are supposed to be
driving traffic to the site.

Linking strategy

New and relevant content is also essential for building the linking
strategy, especially because Google is able to see through a strategy of
bought links. "After indexation and content, the way other sites link to
yours is a very important third pillar," says Kelt. "The algorithms see
it as a very relevant indicator of the expertise of your site."

The rise of social media, blogs and forums all play into the linking
part of the process, but they also call for a higher degree of
creativity among SEO specialists. "A link that appears across a forum
obviously gives additional equity and status, as well as driving the
actual traffic through," says James Keehan, commercial product director
at The Search Works. "So this is where we start looking at more
innovative ideas, like how can we encourage more forums to link to this
site? "

The growth in social media is the not the only development to have
created challenges for the search world during the past year. The
introduction of universal search, pioneered by Ask.com and Yahoo! but
officially christened by Google last May, brought news, pictures, video,
maps and other data into the equation, and very quickly the SEO industry
has had to come to terms with the implications. "It will get to the
point where it is not a question of standing out with an image or a
video clip," says Mills. "It will be that you are broke without
one."

For the time being, however, most advertisers continue to fight over
text results. But there are also significant worries here for the
corporate world, as the arrival of universal search brings with it an
increased threat from unsolicited user-generated content. "UGC is very
fresh, so quite often it gets listed quite high in the rankings," says
Jonty Kelt. "If you are an advertiser and one of your last 100 customers
had a bad experience and then wrote something on a blog or social media
site, that may well show up on page one."

In terms of the worst-case scenario, Grant Whiteside, co-founder and
technical director of Ambergreen, is pithier still. "The higher the
profile you have, the more you are up for a slapping from the public,"
he says. "A search engine now is fast becoming almost like a PR tool,
and you can sink or swim by it."

Search engine reputation management is the key. "One of the main things
is to ensure there are more positive than negative reviews online," says
Kelt. "You can create your own customer feedback on your site,
encouraging people to submit photos of the hotel room view or reviews of
how much they liked the beds."

All of which is evidence that, while SEO isn't getting any easier to
cheat, it is at least becoming far harder to ignore.

THE GREEN AWARDS MAKE STRIDES WITH ORGANIC SEARCH

The Green Awards were launched in 2006 to recognise outstanding creative
work that communicates the importance of corporate social
responsibility, sustainable development and ethical best practice for
brands. The awards need stand out and they maintain it with a page-one
ranking in Google, above instances where other publications have
mentioned the awards.

The trick to achieving this is in careful tracking and analytics,
according to Ane-Mari Peter, managing director of on-IDLE, the web
design and development agency behind the project. "It is important that
the customer has a site that appeals to them and reflects their
organisation's services, products and brand positioning accurately, but
it is equally important that the site can be found on organic search -
and not just in Google," says Peter.

"Sometimes, compromises must be made and we explain these to customers
by physically running searches and going through the results. Training a
customer to read and understand their site's usage tracking is critical
- it is not just about unique visits."

Using SEO specialist Elemental Communications, on-IDLE employs traffic
analysis to review keywords and results monthly and ensure keywords are
reflected in a site's metadata in a variety of formats, to cater for
typos and different forms of expression.

According to Elemental director, Tim Gibbon, the most essential
requirements for a successful site are to be found within the website
itself. "The basics, such as site architecture, technology, good, clean
code and maintenance, are critical," he says.

"From the building blocks of a site, brands need to tie in the cosmetics
and the detail, which really makes the difference. There is a generic
checklist that all brands should consider, but ultimately it will be
their products, services, audience and the media or platforms that
determine what services they use."

PRICERUNNER LOOKS IN-HOUSE FOR INDEXING

While some specialist companies can attempt to corner the market in a
particular niche term, spare a thought for those whose very business
specifically involves an enormous breadth of product choice.

Price comparison shopping engine PriceRunner.co.uk, part of ValueClick,
is in that very position, which meant the decision to manage its SEO
strategy in-house was a huge undertaking.

"As a business, we have about 235 different categories, as opposed to
lots of niche retailers who have a very limited inventory," says Adam
Wilson, search manager, PriceRunner.co.uk. "Finding keywords is not a
problem - it is trying to open up all that content to the search
engines." Google's advice that websites should make careful use of
Sitemaps is crucial here, but with around a million products in its
database, just the task of indexing the site for the search engines was
a major one.

"We are effectively the amalgamation of various retailers' product
feeds, so every product has a page," says Wilson. "We had a lot of
dynamic characters in the URLs - ampersands and symbols that the search
engines don't like. A lot of companies use agencies, but we did the vast
majority of work in-house and it was really quite time consuming."

Some of the biggest drivers of the site are consumer electronics gadgets
such as MP3 players and digital cameras and, though the effort to keep
on top is a never-ending one, Wilson is reasonably satisfied with
PriceRunner's rankings in those areas, two years into the in-house SEO
project.

"The way the site works, we would like some pages to be ranked higher
than others, but ultimately, like everyone else, we are in the lap of
Google," he says.