Getting Found

Web clutter makes market for search optimization

It’s a simple thing to start a Web site and fill it with information.

It’s another thing altogether to get visitors to the site.

For companies in need of assistance there is the growing market of search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO helps customers design their web pages so they are more likely to be picked up by search engines.

Prominent search engines such as Google and Yahoo! look for key word combinations, as well as shared Web links, to determine which sites will appear first for searches. SEO providers know this, and know how to make customers’ sites appealing, said Marci De Vries, president of MDV Communications in Baltimore.

“The Web site becomes a communications tool rather than an online brochure,” De Vries said. That means companies don’t have to sit around and wait to be found.

Search engines are an obvious potential tool for companies looking to grow because, besides checking e-mail, running searches is the second most popular activity on the Internet, said Hollis Thomases, president of Web marketing firm Web Ad.vantage Inc. in Havre de Grace.

There are two basic types of search results, she said. The first is “organic” — the lists of links that appear in response to queries. The second is paid search results, where companies pay advertising fees to have their information appear in boxed ads, sometimes next to the organic results.

While paid results guarantee appearance, they don’t guarantee notice. Anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of search engine users ignore the paid results, leaving a lot of potential customers.

“If you’re not in organic results, then you’re missing 60 percent to 80 percent of your audience,” said Thomases.

For its customers, G3 Advertising Inc. in Linthicum provides its own form of TLC: traffic, linking, and content.

Chris Boggs, director of online marketing for G3, said the keys for search engine optimization are to keep Web site content uncluttered and efficient, to link to related sites and to drive traffic through additional marketing. If a company follows these steps, it dramatically increases its odds of being noticed by Web searchers.

“You really want your on-page content to appear as high up as possible on the page when a search engine starts crawling,” Boggs said. “The more relevant content it finds… the better you’re going to do in the rankings.”

The need for search optimization has grown as Web search technology has evolved, according to a spokesman for Search Engine Marketing Professional Organizations.

In the late ’90s — the early days of search engines — optimization was relatively easy, as it relied almost exclusively on key words encoded in the various web pages. However, this simplicity led to abuse, with many Web sites employing “bait and switch” tactics to lure browsers to irrelevant sites. Users were turned off by this inefficiency, and began to abandon search engines.

The major current search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, rose to prominence because they developed new algorithms and methods to stop this search spam.