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Technology > Hide and Seek

How to get your company noticed on search engines.

words by > Lee Gimpel

With so many buying decisions now starting with an online search, search engine optimization (SEO) is much more than an academic exercise. It has been around for a long while in internet terms—dating to at least 1996, two years before anyone had Googled anything. SEO is not a hip, new trend; it is a well-codifi ed body of knowledge with shelves of books devoted to it. Yet a lot of companies still don’t seem to understand why it’s important or how to go about it to maximize its benefi ts.

Try fi nding one of the big advertising agencies’ websites and you’ll see this in action. Th ese are the companies that we logically believe to be society’s marketing smarty-pants, the experts in eff ective communication—yet somebody searching for them on the web would have some diffi culty ahead. Why? Because these companies, like so many—even the very biggest—aren’t designing their sites to be search-engine friendly. It sounds like it could be a very involved process and, on one end of the SEO spectrum, it is. But even the most basic steps can make a diff erence and can be done in a few minutes.

Quick Fixes

If your title bar—usually blue and at the top of your internet browser window—says something like “Welcome” or “Untitled,” replace it with your company name and/or a brief description of your company.

Make sure you have a site description, or “meta description,” for your site which succinctly tells the world what your web pages are about.

Use synonyms, says Bruce Clay, president of internet business consultancy, Bruce Clay, Inc. So if you provide advertising services, be sure that text on your site also mentions that you do marketing and promotion.

Longer-term Fixes

Unfortunately, search engines can’t classify what they can’t see, and for the most part this means Flash sites or graphics fi les. Try to decrease your dependence on gee-whiz visuals in favor of plain old text even though it may not look as sexy.

Make your site more valuable. Add tutorials or other features that go beyond just the barest of necessities. Th ere are, aft er all, lots of companies that do what you do—why should search engines think yours is more pertinent to people looking online?

Lastly, but most importantly, get more sites to link to yours. Th is shows that other people think what you are doing is worthwhile. Be prepared: Clay says to fi gure on spending an hour to get just one quality link to you. Rather than sending a blast email, you might have to (gasp!) write a real letter or make a phone call and request that favor.