Each one of these search engines acts as a gateway to “getting found” on the Internet. As a business owner with a web presence, the question becomes apparent: Do I need to consider all of these search engines when optimizing your website? The answer is no!

The reality is that 95% of all search engine traffic is generated by a very small number of search engines, about 100 actually. So should you be concerned about 100 search engines? No! The majority of search engine traffic actually works off only 3 unique databases.

You guessed it! Google, Bing & Yahoo! are the 3 unique databases that feed 95% of all search engine queries. The remaining 5% of traffic coming from largely unknown search engines still accounts for a significant amount of users and daily searches, collectively. Individually, however, they should not form part of your Internet marketing strategy.

By far, Google Search is the most-used search engine on the Internet representing almost 89% of all searches.

The number of searches conducted on a daily basis equals several hundred million queries. To accommodate the high volume of daily searches, Google has developed a process of returning sites that were considered the most relevant to the search term used. By delivering the most relevant sites back to the user, this will ensure the user is getting back what they are looking for, and in the end, facilitate a good experience with their search. If the user is happy, then Google has done their job right! And the statistics show they are doing their job overwhelmingly well to have 88.8% of Internet users on their site.

But what about Bing & Yahoo!? Compared to Google, they are not doing as well as Google, with 4.2% and 2.4% respectively. That may seem like a small slice of the market share pie, but the sheer volume of daily searches means 12,600,000 daily searches for Bing, and 7,200,000 for Yahoo!

Since the introduction of Bing by Microsoft in 2009, Google now has real competition for search engine usage. Google is still number one, but Bing’s popularity is definitely on the rise. Some experts agree this will become a two horse race in the world of search engines.

Essentially they both operate in the same manner. They both utilize software programs designed to ‘crawl’ the Internet, follow the links, and add the site to its database. There really is no need for a company to submit their site to Google or Bing. Over time, your site will be found and added to the database all on its own. There are a few differences in Google & Bing’s approach to ranking web sites. Much of those differences are very technical, and best understood by your web master.

There is no doubt that Bing has made large inroads into cyber space navigation and that its popularity is continuing to increase, but is Bing going to replace Google as the number one search engine? Not likely, at least not for a (long) while.

Google still has the huge advantage of “time”, over Bing. Considering that Google has been operating since 1998 and Bing only since 2009, Google has 11 years of additional experience with billions to trillions of keyword search experience to develop word associations and nuances that Bing still lacks. However, in the U.S. (sorry, not available in Canada – yet), Bing has leveraged its Facebook partnership and includes it as a feature on the search engine results page – the Facebook Sidebar.

Based on the search query, Bing will populate the sidebar with Facebook information such as “Friends who might know” or “People who might know”, as well as, provide the option to “Ask friends”. Basically Bing hooks you up with your Facebook feed, all the “likes” and other information from your Friends that may be relevant to your search query. This sidebar also provides feeds to the other major social media platforms. So not only does Bing search the Internet for you, it also helps you to expand your search to your “Friends” through the massive reach of social media. Time will tell if the Facebook Sidebar will drive up Bing’s popularity at the expense of Google.

What search engine is best depends on how you plan to use it. While Google’s search may be best for gathering information about your favorite sports team or a famous author, Bing may have the search giant beat in the realm of social and local knowledge.

Several white hat approaches were discussed in our last e-newsletter and include:

• Finding keywords that best suit what your target surfers use in a search query;
• Optimizing your on-site content;
• Developing quality inbound links to your web site;
• Ensuring your web site is as user-friendly as possible.

In this e-newsletter we will focus our attention on black hat SEO techniques, what not to do in your SEO efforts! Black hat techniques refer to any approaches that are designed to manipulate search engine results and rank your website artificially higher than it should. Web sites that use black hat techniques will tend to rank higher initially until the search engines recognize that black hat techniques are being used. Search engines may then penalize the web site by significantly reducing its ranking or even de-listing the site! The allure of black hat SEO is that in the short-term, the improved ranking can lead to significant benefits for the web site owner.

Keep in mind, however, that black hat approaches are often intended to direct, or redirect users to web sites that they were not necessarily intending to visit. More importantly, the use of black hat techniques has the potential, if not the intent to trick, or be abusive to users or other web site owners. This should become clear as we highlight a few more of the common black hat techniques.

Addition of irrelevant words
Adding irrelevant words to the web content can lead to more page hits. For example, including popular keywords (e.g., Justin Bieber) in the content for a farm implement dealership may raise the ranking of the implement dealer’s website and drive more traffic to their site. Clearly this is misleading for Bieber fans.

Keyword stuffing
Repeating keywords in your content to the point that the content is meaningless or gibberish could contribute to a higher ranking for that page, despite the fact that the content is meaningless. Nonetheless, it will prove to be a futile experience for your visitors as they try and make sense of the content.

Invisible text
Including text that is the same colour as the background. It is undetectable to the visitor, but search engines read it, ranking the site higher and misleading potential visitors.

Cloaking
Using a script to provide search engines with one set of content and site visitors with another. Users are tricked into visiting a site with substantially different content than what they were searching for. Often, seemingly innocent search results are clicked and the user could be taken to a porn site, for example.

Link Farms
Increasing the number of links to or from your site from unrelated sites, or sites with poor quality content in an attempt to improve your visibility to search engines.

This list covers some of the more commonly used black hat techniques. While some of these techniques may seem fairly innocent (irrelevant key words, keyword stuffing), it should be fairly evident that black hat SEO is intended to dupe the user and benefit the web site owner.

Legitimate, or white hat SEO techniques do work, but as we explained in the last e-newsletter, it takes time and tweaking for the results to show. How much time? That depends on how well a site is optimized. Using white hat SEO, OfficeSmarts has helped sites move to a page 1 listing in as little as 4 weeks. In the end, every site is different and we caution our clients to not expect fast results, and as long as they see movement within 3 months, that is a good thing!

It’s important to be aware of black hat SEO techniques and to avoid them. You may find yourself in a situation where an SEO specialist promises to optimize your site and get you improved ranking results that are almost too good to be true. Chances are that they will be using black hat techniques. The temptation to use black hat techniques may be great, but as a legitimate business operator providing a service, do you want to risk damaging your reputation or having your web site de-listed simply for short-term gain?

Hmmmm. If only there was some way to get more widget-surfers on to your web site, sales would be better!

Well, that some way, is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is a process by which websites are created not just to attract more traffic, but to attract highly targeted visitors to your website. According to our scenario, this means getting more widget-surfers to visit your site (although you might still want some grommet-surfers to visit because eventually they might need a widget).

Effective SEO is a sophisticated process consisting of many components and many nuances in respect to how it is organized. The purpose of this e-newsletter is to provide a basic framework of how SEO works.

When doing a search on any of the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, the web sites that display are a result of what that search engine determined was ‘most relevant’ to your keyword search. These are the results that display in the organic or natural results listing, not to be confused with the paid or sponsored listings at the top and right of those results (click on image below to see example). But how does a search engine determine if you are more relevant than the other millions of web sites that could possibly display for that particular keyword?

Natural or organic SEO results is based on how well you have optimized your web content to have search engines recognize your site as being relevant to specific keywords. Note, there is no payment to search engine companies.

How you rank isn’t based on using fairy dust or a dart board, or even an expectation to be “found” for that particular keyword once your site has been published. Search engines use search spiders to crawl through your web site looking for content that best matches a user’s search query, and frankly, they don’t care how nice your images look. Images, to a spider, is like hitting a blank wall. If you want to be found for “widget experts”, that phrase must be utilized in various forms throughout your site.

Optimizing your web site involves a number of steps and processes as outlined in the flowchart below. All these components contribute to SEO to varying degrees and it boils down to finding the right balance between them.

Web Site Objectives
The first step in an SEO campaign is to determine the goals and objectives of your web site. In other words, the client should be able to articulate before embarking on an SEO campaign the one action they would like their users to take while on the site. Do you want them to download a brochure, purchase a product, or complete an on-line form? You should also have a very clear idea of your target audience. There is no point optimizing for all of Canada if you only sell to Manitoba customers. Once these objectives are determined, site structure and navigation can be established to match your goals/objectives and call-to-action.

Keywords
First, think about which keywords and phrases your potential customers will use in their search query to find your web site. Then, research your competition. It helps to understand how many other sites have already optimized their site using the same keyword(s). The broader the keyword (one or two words), the more competition there will be for it and the lower your ranking may be on the results page. Using long-tail keywords (three or more words) can reduce the number of wrong visitors to your site and bring about more ‘qualified’ visitors. It may, however, be too narrow a keyword leading to fewer searches. The objective is to find mid-range keywords to minimize the competition but still provide ample searches.

On-site Optimization
Once the keywords are determined, it’s time for on-site optimization; that is, incorporating the keywords into the web site. It is important to optimize each page of a web site since search engines rank individual pages of web sites, not just the home page! This means putting keywords into the content of each page, as well as, into specific coding areas that are not normally viewed by users, but are read by the search spiders and contribute to SEO and your overall ranking. These include meta title tags, meta description tags, image names, internal linking strategy, page names, and other coded components of the website.

Link Building
Link building is done by establishing relevant, inbound links to your website. But not just any link, it’s best to have an inbound link that has a page ranking of 7/10 or higher, kind of like rubbing shoulders with the ‘more important’ websites, and thereby gaining a bit more respect by association. Based on the number of inbound links and the quality (page rank) of those links, search engines can analyze the popularity of a website and thereby rank it accordingly. Large numbers of bogus or spam-type links can, however, lower the ranking of a web site. Our SEO Process Flowchart lists a number of options for link building.

Other Contributing Factors
Another important factor to consider is the length of time a web site has been available on the Internet. The longer a web site has been on the Internet, the more trustworthy it appears to search engines and can contribute to a better ranking.

Search engines operate by mathematical algorithms and therefore, have certain guidelines as to how SEO should be developed. Abiding by these rules refers to white hat SEO, i.e. playing by the rules. Black hat SEO refers to any approaches that are designed to manipulate the search results by trying to trick the search engines.
Let it be noted, however, that black hat SEO techniques may only produce short-term gains. Search engines can often detect black hat SEO and will penalize that web site by lowering its ranking or completely removing it from any ranking.

By no means, should SEO be considered a do-it-yourself effort. Your website company will know what strategies to employ to get you the best results, including other tricks not mentioned above. If you don’t know what an xml sitemap is, how to create one, and what to do with it after you’ve got one, then your SEO campaign is based left with an expert!

After you complete your SEO, it’s important to measure the results and then tweak the process until you see the results you’re looking for. This process does take time and it does require regular maintenance and updating. In the long-term, however, it benefits you by driving more interested users to your web site.