Investor relations professionals are abundantly aware that a publicly traded organization does not have direct control over the price of its stock. But they also know that there are certain things they can do, such as talking frankly and enthusiastically with analysts and investors, and posting positive earnings, that encourage coverage and fair evaluation. They also know that targeting a specific stock price is not necessarily a constructive primary objective, as cause and effect are related only loosely through the strangely elastic string of investor psychology, and because larger market forces will often prevail, regardless.
With SEO (search engine optimization, it’s the same thing. Except the IR pro is your company’s internet content writer, your stock price is the position of your web site in Google’s search results, and the unknown forces are internet click patterns and the unpublished algorithm that Google uses to determine search results.
SEO should, in fact, be a top marketing objective. Attaining the very top position in the Google search results listing for a specific query is not necessarily a constructive pursuit. But you should aim to get on the first page of Google results for key words and descriptive phrases such as your company name, product names, product categories, and key applications. Get into the top five results, and a visit from your target readers will be more likely because they’ll be able to see you without having to scroll down.
So how does one optimize search engine results? Here are the basics:
1. The content of titles and subtitles appearing near the tops of top-level pages should contain target search terms. The content of these positions, especially when appearing in header typeface, is more important in terms of SEO than content farther down the page, and farther down within the structure of the site (subordinate pages).
2. Target search terms should appear in searchable type. A graphic that contains the search terms, even if it’s completely legible, doesn’t count. If you can copy and paste the actual letters and words, it’s searchable. If you end up with a graphic (or nothing) in your clipboard, it isn’t.
3. Meta-tags are still important. I think the reason for confusion on this point is that, overall, meta-tags are less important than they were a few years ago, and, meta-tags are relatively less important for blogs than they are for ordinary web sites. Meta-tags help Google index sites accurately, and every non-blog web site should have them.
UPDATE: Monday; September 21, 2009: Meta-tags don’t matter after all.
4. There is just no getting around the SEO advantage of having interesting, original, searchable, stable, and frequently updated content. By analyzing web traffic and link utilization, Google can tell if your web site content is interesting or not, and ranks it accordingly. The content must be original, so that its search engine ranking impact is not diluted by duplication on another site. The content must be searchable, with the most important key words or phrases in the header copy, and with other likely search terms appearing within the body copy. The content must be stable — Google hates being a liar, so leave your content where Google first finds it. Also, search results balance measures of anticipated relevance and interest encoded in Google’s search algorithm, and favor frequently updated sites. So update frequently, but leave existing content in place if you can.
5. Avoid broken links and the ham-fisted ploys that some webmasters use to try to trick Google into assigning a higher ranking to a site than it deserves. These things will degrade your search engine results, or worse. You know what broken links are, but what are the ham-fisted ploys? Among others, they are: meaningless repetition of key words and phrases, attempting to hide meaningless repetition of key words and phrases by using the same color for the type and the background, and using link farms (sites that just sell links to other sites) in an attempt to create a backlink structure. Google is way ahead of these tricks.
Your site’s readers include prospects, customers, investors, employees, journalists, and search engine algorithms. Make your site attractive to the algorithms, and the other readers will see it whenever they do a search using appropriate terms. If your web site is about medicine or biotech, contact me for help optimizing your search visibility.
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