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PrintGood hits can be as hard for Web sites to produce as they are for the Pirates.
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 Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette |
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The session leaders found plenty of room for improvement. "I'm confident the hit rate is going to go up," said Ms. Romzick, who plans to adapt suggestions that she add more useful text and fix places where software prevented the search engine automated scavengers from reading information.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN have become both the explorers -- and increasingly the trading routes -- of the business world. The daylong event at the Westin Convention Center Hotel drew more than 130 people, including ad agency representatives and business people eager to learn how to be found by multitudes, not left lonely on an invisible desert island.
The Pittsburgh audience's wide-ranging attire -- some wore polo shirts while others went with dark suits -- showed an awareness that a company's Web front door can no longer be considered solely something for the tech crew to worry about. Even small businesses, such as Ms. Romzick's, that don't have a tech crew need an Internet presence.
"Search is really in the marketing mix," said Brian Lantz, a search account manager with Green Tree firm Impaqt. The firm co-hosted the event and Mr. Lantz and his colleague, search marketing strategist Justin Vavrick, ended the day by taking volunteers willing to have their sites analyzed in front of everyone.
Throughout the day, session topics ranged from bidding on keywords and writing copy to maximizing visits to setting up "landing spots" that keep searchers from clicking away.
Mr. Lantz said he was impressed by the level of questions during his sessions, noting that just two years ago people were much less familiar with the issues and the technology.
Specifically, the focus in the critique was on what the industry calls "organic" search. The term refers to that wonderful achievement of having a Web site turn up in the basic results when an individual searches the Web for a particular topic -- such as when someone types "chocolate" into a Google search and the Hershey company's Web site is the second natural choice.
That is considered more valuable, and often more difficult to achieve, than paid search results.
Paid search refers to the practice of bidding on keywords so a certain Web site will be shown -- but labeled as a "sponsored" result -- next to the organic results. The chocolate search, for example, turned up a sponsored result for "Chocolate by LG," a Verizon Wireless device described by the ad copy as part-phone, part-MP3 player.
Turning up in the right person's natural search results can be lucrative.
If a shopper who wants a new roof lands on a roofer's Web site and buys a roof, that's a sale that didn't cost a lot to pull in.
But there are tricks of the trade as well as secrets that even the professionals haven't completely divined. Because the search engine operators know everyone is trying to horn in on the results, they keep changing the way they rank useful sites.
For example, a company on Smallman Street, Downtown, uses two different domain names: www.pressurechemical.com and www.presschem.com.
Those turned up high in both an organic and paid search results when the term "pressure chemical" was entered, but the Impaqt team suggested choosing one and redirecting Web traffic there.
"What you have is two sites serving the same content," said Mr. Vavrick. "The engines aren't penalizing you for it" ... yet, he added. That could change so it would be better to concentrate the traffic in one place.
A site promoting Carnegie Mellon University's Engineering and Technology Innovation Management one-year masters program got the once over, too. "What's your target keyword?" asked Mr. Vavrick as he skimmed the text, adding that perhaps dropping in terms such as "accelerated masters program" might bring in more searchers.
He suggested reviewing similar programs at other schools and determining what the terms the industry uses most often.
Also, links to the university's main Web page were so prominently displayed that he was concerned searchers would arrive, only to head off somewhere else immediately.
In general, building connections to other sites -- and getting them to link to yours -- is a popular way to boost a Web site's status in the search engine ratings.
It helps to produce fresh news content for others to tap or to link to the corporate sites of members of the board of directors.
But search engines judge the quality of links, too, said Mr. Lantz.
An automotive site presumably would get more cachet if a national auto association posted a link to it than if the owner's nephew's Web page on cool cars did.
He suggested the first page of company Web sites should help people make a connection, perhaps by listing a phone number or having a place to sign up to receive e-mail alerting them to new developments.
Meanwhile, at the Critical Competitive Strategies' site, the Impaqt team didn't see enough words or "content" to explain the 2-year-old company's premise to first-time visitors.
Ms. Romzick noted she had written more but was concerned too much text would be a turnoff.
The session leaders also found drop-down menus had been set up on Critical Competitive Strategies' site using a program that kept the search engine spiders from reading the information there, further limiting the possibility they might see the site as useful.
"We did [the Web site] really grass roots," Ms. Romzick said after the session.
It had been frustrating to figure out why so few searchers were finding the company, which helps develop strategies for bringing engineered products to market.
Her exposure seemed to pick up after she began doing some teaching at Robert Morris University but she hasn't picked up any clients from the Web.
She hoped that would change after she made some improvements to the site, noting, "Many people will see that before they'll talk to you."
