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Small business: How to rise to
the top on search engines
By Jay
MacDonald • Bankrate.com
 Three
years ago, Steve Schoepfer didn't know how to search for a Web site,
much less construct one.
As a top-producing Realtor specializing in high-end
golf course communities in Naples, Fla., Schoepfer admits that,
like most small businessmen, he had little time or interest in joining
the virtual rush hour on the highly touted information superhighway.
"It was all new to me," he recalls. "In conversing
with people who were computer savvy, I realized I'm pretty limited
in my knowledge of the Internet and e-mail."
But his clients were not.
To better serve his upscale buyers who hail
from England, Scotland, Germany, Austria, Canada and across the
United States, Schoepfer finally bit the bullet, hired a local Web
design and hosting provider, and tiptoed online with Naples
Golf Properties.
"There was very little traffic the first few
months, and then it gradually snowballed," he said. "I was surprised."
Last year, Schoepfer turned more than one Internet
lead a month into a sale. Today, he estimates that as much as a
third of his sales come directly from his Web site.
Don't fear the 'M' word
Just getting a functional Web site up
and running can be a major undertaking for many small business owners.
Bring up the dreaded M word -- as in marketing their Web site --
and their eyes start to roll back in their heads. Try to explain
search engines, meta tags, robots and spiders, and you might as
well be speaking Etruscan.
"Mostly, they choose to ignore it altogether,"
says Rebecca Coffey, whose Vermont Web Marketing seeks to optimize
returns for its baffled clients. "Most people think of search engines
as a game of chance where all the variables are so unpredictable
that there's no way to really stack the deck in your favor."
But, uh, aren't they?
She laughs. "To paraphrase W.C. Fields' line
about poker: Are search engines a game of chance? Not the way I
play it."
Here's what you need to know to increase traffic
to your site.
Priming the search engines
Search engines are key to helping customers
find you online. There are more than 400 search engines of widely
varying capabilities. You register with them or they find you with
the help of site-scanning robots or spiders. The result: you wind
up on a found list when keywords are entered in a search.
The goal of search engine positioning is to
move your company as close to the top of that list as possible,
maximizing your chances of being visited by notoriously impatient
cybershoppers. Coffey says most businesses can simplify e-marketing
matters by forgetting they ever heard of 98 percent of those search
engines.
"I use three search engines -- AltaVista, Google
and Yahoo -- and there are another six that are important," she
says. "Everything else doesn't mean anything at all."
(In addition to those mentioned, your target
list might include directories LookSmart and MSN, and the search
engines Excite, HotBot, Go/Infoseek and Lycos.) Next, consider your
customer demographics.
"Search engines fall into two different groups,
the academic category and the lifestyle category," she says. "AltaVista
usually carries about 15 percent of Web traffic, but those people
might not all be in the mood to buy something; a lot of them are
academic researchers. If you are selling a lifestyle product, you
might be far more interested in Excite or Infoseek."
Be forewarned: Each search engine has its own
method of determining whose listings appear and in what order. To
further baffle you, the methods change constantly and are rarely
spelled out in the online rules and regs. Every Web marketing company
has its own approach to optimizing your placement with the major
search engines.
Most focus on your site's search engine registration,
particularly your keywords and the meta tags that help the various
search engines list you when the appropriate search terms are entered.
If your Web site has been online for more than a few months and
your traffic is still at a trickle, the problem may lie in how you
have identified yourself.
Better yet, bid for success
Tom Fanelli thinks he's found a better way to
win the search engine shell game.
Fanelli's Omnigraphix
Corp., a Fort Myers, Fla.-based Web design and hosting company,
sends its customers directly to GoTo, the Web's most visible fee-based
search engine.
"The best way to drive traffic to our client
sites has been GoTo," says Fanelli. "Listing a site with any search
engine is free but being listed in the top 10 is usually far from
free, especially if it's a really competitive field. With GoTo,
there's no nonsense. If you want a No. 1 position, you bid more
than the guy who's got it and it's yours for a month. It's all spelled
out on the site."
Fanelli contends that most prime real estate
on the major search engines has long ago been secured by big bucks.
Sometimes the top dogs have purchased their keywords outright, sometimes
there are other more dubious factors involved that effectively shut
out the smaller businesses. GoTo levels that playing field, he says.
"At GoTo, you are guaranteed visitors; that's
the difference," he says. "You go into GoTo knowing you're going
to pay this much per visitor. You don't pay for the exposure of
being No. 1; you pay for actual visitors. No one else guarantees
that."
Coffey isn't as much of a GoTo believer, but
he encourages priming the pump a little.
"I always say do two things that don't involve
spiders -- pay Yahoo to expedite your listing and pay LookSmart.
That's it. That's $300 out of your pocket. It used to be you could
approach a search engine, and within a couple of weeks you were
everywhere. Well, now it takes eight to 12 months to even get reviewed
by Yahoo. And LookSmart, though not a very well used site, feeds
data to a lot of other sites. You want to get on those two fast,
and for $300, it's worth it."
Neither Fanelli nor Coffey recommend buying
banner ads unless they are on a prominent thoroughfare, say a state
or regional portal or Internet directory such as AltaVista.
"The click-through rate is between one-half
and one-and-one-half percent on most other sites, and banner ad
prices haven't dropped as precipitously as their performance," says
Coffey. "But on directory sites, they make sense."
Free or inexpensive links also can help drive
traffic to your site if you have the time to cultivate the affiliations
and reciprocate in kind on your site.
Or combine the two with reciprocal banner exchange
through MS-Link
Exchange, which offers you a free banner on its affiliate sites
for every banner you put on your own.
Fanelli urges caution before buying an ad on
the online version of the local newspaper where you place your print
advertising.
"A newspaper site is typically going to get
you a really wide range, people out of state who want to learn more
about the area, people locally who don't read the paper. If your
client is an end user, it might be great, but if you are business-to-business,
you might do better on more specialized sites."
Don't forget to follow
through
As Schoepfer found out, Web site traffic
is great, but sales are even better.
"It's one thing to get the leads, it's another
to make the calls and follow up," he says. "It's a combination of
having a good address, promoting that address and following up on
the leads."
If your time is better spent selling, you might
be able to persuade your Web host to initiate some of the marketing
tactics for you.
"These are not hard things to do. It basically
depends on the business owner's time," says Fanelli. "I encourage
most people to do it themselves, but if there is design involved,
we will typically do it for them."
Still not happy with your virtual traffic? Coffey
says don't be afraid to search for a Web marketing consultant. The
good ones will give you plenty of solid client references and even
a free evaluation.
"The mistake people make is they think good
graphic design plus good interactive design equals good Web design,"
she says. "You need to add good marketing design to that. Three
things. If your cousin is making your Web site with free tools,
at the very best he might be able to handle one of those, he might
do the second passably well, but he won't be able to do all three."
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