Search and You Shall Be Found

Maximising the exposure of your website to draw customers and future sales to your business is a must with the competitive world wide web. Rebecca Spicer explores how search engine marketing and optimisation could be the answer to getting more hits.

Small to medium enterprises are increasingly looking to the internet to generate revenue, reduce operating costs, and to enable them to compete more effectively with larger businesses, according to the 2005 Sensis e-Business Report. The importance of the web as a trading tool for SMEs is rising, as is the number of consumers who are ordering goods and services online.

The report reveals almost half of all SMEs have a website, with another 14 percent recording an intention to get one in the next year. So in the great sprawl that is the web, how do you ensure potential clients get to your site?

According to Gavin Appel, vice president of search at online intelligence company Hitwise, seven out of the top 10 websites visited by Australians are either a search engine or portal. "We see that search is really dominating internet usage," he explains. As a result, businesses are looking to search engines as a strong means to customer acquisition.

The key, then, is to get your website on the first page or two of search engine listings when individuals search using key words relevant to your business.

SEO your SME

Most search engines use technology that crawls the internet and adds relevant web pages to its search engine for free. These will deliver the organic (free) listings for any particular search, so it’s important that your website gets found by these crawlers. Optimising your website so it can be found—search engine optimisation (SEO)—is key to any web strategy. This involves having the correct key words, word density, domain names, titles and structure of your website, along with relevant links to your site, so the crawlers find your web pages and link them with key words being used in searches.

"The unfortunate thing is, it’s not an exact science and the search engines do tend to change the goal posts quite often to try and keep one step ahead," says Patrick Smitka, director of SEO business, optimisation.com.au. And there are a lot of factors—such as the complex algorithms used by search engines, affecting how a site is going to rank–that are beyond anybody’s control. "Therefore, nobody can promise a brand new website will rank in the top three pages."