Start With Questions

Alchemweb begins by asking you why you want a website in order to clarify your objectives, and then asks who your customers are, what do they want and how will your website help them?

Your customers will exhibit different personalities, have different life-experiences, use the internet in different ways and will have different needs. What angles will they be approaching your product and your company from?

It's A Wrench, Isn't It?
(What Do You Mean, 'What Am I Selling?')

In order to sell you have to know what you're selling. Is it reliability, status, convenience, quality, peace of mind, hope? If the appeal of your cast-iron wrench is its ruggedness when used at the bottom of a sewer then it won't be much use focussing your marketing efforts on how good it looks in the lounge.

If you were selling flowers to a young man what would you be selling?

Flowers?

Or Hope, love and forgiveness? Is the price likely to be important to such a customer or will speed of delivery, a gift-wrapping service and the chance to personalise his gift going to carry more weight?

How Do Your Customers Talk?

What words do your customers use?

Knowing a little about your customers and what your company is selling, Alchemweb will then spend some time on working out keyphrases that your customers are likely to use in the search engines. These keyphrases can be tested using a relatively cheap search engine advertising campaign to see which are the most successful. A regular analysis of your log files can further narrow down the most effective phrases .

Keeping an Eye on the Competition

Alchemweb will also perform a basic analysis of your competitors. What resources are they putting into their SEO campaign, what are their relative SEO strengths and weaknesses, and how easy will it be to beat them in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)?

Dances With Words

Next the copy is written. Each page is targetted at a keyphrase or two (using synonmys as well) for the search engines and is simultaneously targetted at taking your customers through the buying cycle. The Title Tag still appears to carry a lot of weight in terms of the relevance of the page for inclusion in the SERPS. Ideally the text that appears below the Title Tag in the SERPS will tempt users to visit your site, though no one can control what text the Search Engines choose to show.

Link-juice Makes You Strong!

Now a basic linking strategy is drawn up. The importance of sites in search engines is largely determined at present by how many other 'good quality' sites link to yours - you need to be noticed.

External link-building requires an investment of resources - time, energy, money or contacts - to reach out to suppliers, customers and the niche community in which your business belongs.

Internal link-building can focus weight on pages that you value, for example those that highlight your expertise

Alchemweb doesn't offer a conventional link-building service as such but does offer guidelines to clients and can recommend one or two professional linkbuilders.  

Imnaginary Marketing Campaign

A vendor of playground equipment could pursue the following simple marketing strategy to create initial interest from end users (children and parents).

Online, a child-friendly design competition is started, a blog that describes and shows the manufacture of its equipment is revealed to the waiting world, colouring pages for very young children are placed on its website and a set of easy to understand and downloadable specification sheets for parents is commisioned.

Offline, fetes, festivals and demonstrations are visited and equipment is displayed and children encouraged to play on it.

All this leads to interest, and interest leads to links as people reference the vendor's site.

Having created interest from end users the vendor's website now begins to rank for playground equipment keyphrases. The vendor creates additional pages focussed on the needs and desires of potential purchasers (such as education authorities) and leverages the site's popularity with children and parents to get these pages to rank for the phrases education authority buyers are likely to search with.

The company then attempts to convert these qualified visitors into leads, perhaps with a free giveaway or by making a special offer on an accessory with a view to upselling later.

Is Ranking Enough?

There are many factors involved in ranking highly in the Search Engines (and here's a list of at least 50 of those ranking factors). Usage data is also going to grow in importance - how many people visit your site, read your RSS feeds, view your YouTube videos, etc.

Ranking means nothing, however, unless you have qualified visitors and can convert those visitors.

The Future Is Marketing!

Internet Marketing is beginning to reflect offline marketing. The days of the simple tricks that ranked you at the top of the SERPS are not yet over but are slowly drawing to a close. The Search Engines are getting better at analysing signals of quality and are demanding more of those signals of quality before a website will rank. Eventually websites are going to have to be integral parts of businesses that deliver what their customers want before they will rank highly.

But the demands of Search Engines for new signals threaten small businesses. Consider Google Checkout. Provided that Google keeps its eye on the ball, surfers will find Google Checkout easy to use, will recognise and trust the brand name and will implicitly trust business sites that use it. They will therefore value Google Checkout on ecommerce sites.

However, Google Checkout allows Google access to data that no sane businesses would want to reveal. How many units of their product were sold? What is the probable industry-wide profit-margin on these items? What is the company's probable profit-margin? How many chargebacks were there? What is the company's market share? How does it compare to its competitors? What could it afford to pay for advertising? Combine this with the wealth of data that Google can mine from a company's Adwords campagins and Google probably knows more about your market and your place in it than you do.

Furthermore, to use Checkout requires a Google Account (which allows access to Google Web History, Bookmarks and Feedreader, and is also necessary if you wish to use Adwords or Adsense). A Google Account means that potentially you can be tracked around the web. Google has access to the personal preferences and surfing behaviour of a growing number of users through the vast array of services that it offers such as Google Analytics and Feedburner, and increasingly accurate indicators of the financial success and market relevance of a growing number of business websites, as well as an accurate gauge of mass opinion (via search queries) on any subject. Search Engines haven't yet acquired Artificial Intelligence, but given their resources and drive and user-demand for relevance you can see the direction they're heading in. And Google is morphing into a rather unpleasant company (PDF).

The data points listed above - and many more - can be mined by Google (and where Google leads, other Search Engines will follow) to provide signals of quality or (less benignly) to extract maximum proft from adverters whilst keeping advertisers just above a minimum pain threshold.

The Google mindset is inevitably becoming more corporate. Google isn't the only Search Engine in the world but whether or not it's a Western, Russian, Arab, Chinese or Indian Search Engine that eventually dominates the internet Google's current value to us is in the story that Google is beginning to tell: which is, that Search Engines own vast amounts of data about individuals, mass markets and mass opinions, that as a business you play by their rules, and that in a benign political environment Search Engines are wonderful. (But in a malign political environment Search Engines are likely to be terrifying.)

Open Your Eyes, Be Surprised!

Some other factors that Search Engines are likely to consider when ranking websites include personalisation (user A gets different results from user B), semantic indexing (synonyms and antonyms and their context are noted), bookmark managers (X people bookmarked this page for X weeks and then no one did), browser navigation (you went to site B, pressed the back button and came back to site A, scrolled down the page and kept that page open for one minute) and social network analysis (these groups link to these other groups in subculture C, these individual sites play such and such a role in these other groups, information flows from here to here.)

Join A Network!

In the offline world individuals belong to social groups. For example, you might go to a Yoga class, go to the local cafe after that class, read a favourite Yoga magazine, shop in a local health food store, and go to a yearly Mind and Spirit festival. Or maybe you belong to a bikers' club, ride out to meet at a distant pub, read a biker's magazine and go to biker shows.

All these social activities embed you in a group, and you will have a defined position, status and role within that group. And in the online world it's no different for either individuals or businesses. Google and the other Search Engines are looking for signals that your site belongs to a niche within a community, and that related sites think you have value. Which sites link to you? How relevant are they? How much traffic do they send your way? And who do you link to?

By joining a network and by becoming a valued part of a community, you automatically solve many SEO / SEM related problems.

No Shortcuts!

Search Engine optimisation is getting more and more difficult, and in the long-term brilliant marketing (knowing precisely who your customers are and giving them exactly what they want) is going to be the most effective way to optimise your site. But the big players are cottoning on to Internet Marketing, whilst at the same time the Search Engines are seeking to monetize every stage of the buying cycle, and so smaller players risk being outmanouevred and priced out of the market (there are only a limited number of top slots for keywords, and small companies only have limited budgets for PPC). To get visibility and credibility that can be leveraged small businesses need to throw resources - time, money, imagination, contacts - into your marketing strategy and create something truly exceptional.

The bottom line is that the only way to succeed is to know who your customers are and to deliver something that they want.

The Holistic Website (It's A Whole, Man! )

You must NOT rely on Search Engines for your business success. High Search Engine rankings are icing on the business cake but to drive traffic to your website reliably and to convert it you need a sound business model that delivers what your customers want, incorporates organic SEO and PPC (pay per click advertising) and integrates online and offline factors.