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NEWS Mid-year results in for clients: AttorneysForInvestors. com sees 460% increase in reach, Brake Specialists up 650% Welcome to new clients: Synopsys, CSC, Nuventix, Central Family Practice, Sport Clips Major clients Overland Storage and Clifford Law renew for third year of service Two new sites launched for Austin Institute of Real Estate, third in development New sites designed for Breedlove Associates, Eye Physicians of Austin Created new B2C site with ecommerce for Physician-Nutrition.com: best multivitamins. Article on search engine optimization from RefreshWeb on PRWeb New RefreshWeblog is published--news on SEO RefreshWeb gets site optimization and pay per click contracts for Intelletrade SEO contract for Austin photographer G. Russ Images, Inc. RefreshWeb cracks Web for Austin chiropractor, charges up Austin electrician Lyons Electric Search engine marketing for JSC Consultants, Houston Marketing Consultants
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Do Austin Public Companies Measure Up in the Global Business Environment? Internet Marketing Plays a Major Role.This article covers how RefreshWeb puts Austin’s biggest businesses to the test: see how they ranked on the Spider Scale (chart)If you can’t compete globally, you can’t compete. That’s the accepted wisdom in the business world. But do Austin companies really have what it takes to compete on the World Wide Web? That’s what RefreshWeb set out to determine. RefreshWeb is an Austin search engine optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing firm. They review a client company’s website and web strategy to determine if customers can find that company using the 20 most popular search engines, like Google and Yahoo. If the answer is no, they can implement a number of fixes to optimize a company’s web position. And since the World Wide Web is often the global business world’s primary source of information, web position is a critical measure of competitiveness. “It’s a fact of Web life,” said John Rasco, founder of RefreshWeb. “If a potential customer types a relevant inquiry into Google or Yahoo or AltaVista, and your company’s website does not appear in the first 20 responses, your company is going to be missed by 60 percent of the active prospects.” Invisibility does not make for a globally competitive business. To test Austin’s global competitiveness, RefreshWeb analyzed the websites of the top 25 public companies in town, as defined by the Austin Business Journal’s Book of Lists 2003. The sites were evaluated using four critical factors: page content, including keywords, copy, title tags and meta tags; design factors such as the use of graphics and alt.image tags; site architecture factors like the presence of impediments such as frames and dynamic URLs; and conversion/response factors, or how a site is structured to turn a visitor into a sales prospect. In general, just a few of the Austin sites had structural problems – none used frames, and dynamic URLs and graphics were, in general, used appropriately. However, several sites were weak in their conversion/response mechanisms, and quite a few had problems with content factors – probably the single most important criterion for search engine success. To understand why content factors are so critical requires a quick lesson in how search engines work. A search engine like Google is constantly reviewing web sites by sending out little programs called spiders to ‘crawl’ through a few key pages on the site. The spiders read the copy on those pages, as well as the title tag and other features such as the description and meta tags, to glean what the site is about. It grabs specific keyword phrases – descriptive phrases that are repeated in the content of the site – and stores them in a database. When somebody types a search term into the search engine, the search engine goes to the database, matches the search term to stored keyword phrases, scores the appropriateness of the matched terms and responds to the inquiry with a scored list of references. In short, the way search engines work is very content-driven. A poorly designed site will impede the work of the spiders and drastically limit its ability to be found using a search engine. For example, a spider will see that a site uses frames and crawl on to the next site, without reading the content of the first site. Flash animations and graphics (including important text as graphics, such as special typefaces for headlines) are also problematic, because the spiders cannot recognize the content of text within the graphics. The Top Tier: Bring On The
Spiders! The companies were rated on a one to five Spider scale. The good news for Austin is that three of the 24 top public companies (one company in the top 25 – XeTel – closed shop) scored five out of five Spiders: Hoovers, Dell and Vignette. Generally they got the job done through disciplined application of keywords, site architecture and programming that didn’t interfere with the work of the spiders, and easy-to-use response mechanisms. However, there were some problems even in these top sites, as well as some of the sites that received four out of five spiders. In practice, there is at least as much art as science to developing a site that will appear at the top of the response list. Some of the top Austin websites make some common mistakes. Several sites used extensive lists of single keywords – sometimes as many as 50 to 60 single words. The problem is that doesn’t match how people search on the web. Tom Parish, one of RefreshWeb’s principals, explains. “As the web has grown and the number of sites that appear in a search engine response list has exploded, consumers have learned to adapt their approach by using a more specific search term. If you want some quality shoes for work and you type “dress shoes” into Google, you will probably get a response list in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and the first 50 may have nothing to do with what you want. But if you type in “Italian designer dress shoes,” you might get a manageable list relevant to your needs. Consumers have figured this out and web sites need to adapt the content factors of their web sites to this new reality.” “Also, it is important to realize that spiders only read a few pages of a site” Parish continued. “Developing a list of 50, 60 keywords is problematic, because it is not focused enough to help your copywriters generate their 250 words of searchable page copy. Remember the spider is looking for a few specific keyword phrases that are repeated in the content factors of your site, and develop your keyword list accordingly.” Interestingly, Dell Computer, a pioneer in web commerce, makes the opposite mistake. Their keyword list is short and very general. “Dell’s keywords do the job for the ‘big picture’ of what their company does – custom configured PCs for a reasonable cost,” explained Tom Bartling, a web programmer and also a principal at RefreshWeb. “But Dell is a major company with a number of strategic initiatives. For example, they are now offering printers and blade servers, but their recent rankings on Google for these products are 40 and 31, respectively. ‘Enterprise servers’ and ‘PDAs’ aren’t even listed. New initiatives in established companies call for specialized search engine promotion.” A savvy marketer, Dell works the problem with an effective “pay-per-click” program. Every time someone types “PC” or other related words into Google, a paid listing can appear at the top or at the right side of the page. It looks like a response listing, but is in fact an advertisement. “Pay-per-click is a great way to go, because results are immediate and measurable, but it can be prohibitively expensive if not done intelligently,” said John Rasco of RefreshWeb. The Differentiation
Challenge Several of the web sites that scored in the midrange (three or four Spiders) have a similar challenge: how to differentiate their business, and their website, from the competition. The problem is readily apparent with the three insurance companies that appear in the Top 25 Public Companies list. (Three major insurance companies in Austin! Who knew?). Insurance is a well-regulated industry, and the products offered by insurance companies are pretty consistent in a given market. The business is also structured similarly everywhere – underwriters, agents, reinsurers – and there are lots of insurance companies, literally hundreds operating in most markets. How do you distinguish your company from the competition on the web? Tom Parish analyzed the problem. “National Western Life does the best job of the three with their keywords because it includes the greatest number of keywords, has a descriptive meta tag [like a “topic sentence” for the whole web site] and, most importantly, includes geographic identifiers in the keywords, the meta tags and throughout the website.” This is significant because, generally, insurance companies must be licensed to operate in a certain geographical market, and the web recognizes no geographical boundary. Financial Industries Group and Citizens Inc. were sparing in their use of keywords, and in identifying the markets they served. Citizens in particular misses an opportunity because it has a strong presence in a specific market – dollar-denominated life insurance in the Latin American market. None of that appears in its keyword list. Interestingly, Travis Boat Centers shared the same problem with the insurance companies – differentiation that comes from specific terms and the lack of geographical identifiers in the source code and on the website. “Travis Boat used keywords like boat, yachts, fishing, offshore in their list, with no indication that they are primarily a Southeast- and Gulf Coast-centered business,” said Tom Bartling. “I have to believe that’s important to their customer, but not including it made them almost impossible to find on queries of major search engines.” The Unsearchables And then there were the also-rans: companies towards the bottom of the list, and there are some surprises here. High tech companies Silicon Labs and Cirrus Logic are there, as well as companies for whom a website seems like an afterthought, like Schlotzsky’s and Samuels Jewelers. The common error among these sites was the lack of prospect-focused keywords, and a corresponding lack of focus in their web copy. For example, searching on “diamond jewelry,” Samuel’s Jewelers (“A Diamond Tradition Since 1891”) is not listed in the results of the top 20 search engines. For companies that sell leading-edge products, their focus should be on real-world search terms, not their product names: prospects state the problem in general terms to search for a solution. Generally speaking, the bottom ten companies on the list had a technical issue that made their site difficult for the spiders to search. “There were other barriers, like over-reliance on graphics, Flash animations and excessive use of Javascript,” said RefreshWeb’s John Rasco. “The bottom line is the sites are underperforming because they are not centered around the needs of customers: it’s Marketing 101. The proof is that they don’t come up anywhere near the top of the response lists on search terms that we know by our research the sites themselves deem important. They were invisible, either in their keywords or in their construction.” Spinning Sticky Sites for
the WWW Though the tech bust has deflated some of the hype, the fact is that the World Wide Web offers now what it has always offered: friction-free communications with potential customers who, by looking for your company’s site in the first place, are already expressing a strong interest in your product or service. And the importance of the web will only grow as people for whom “research equals web search” – those in their late 20s to mid-30s – move into middle and upper management positions. It is clear that, for Austin businesses, optimization of their company web site for peak performance in search engine results is a challenge that is not going to go away. |
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