You've launched your website, and your front- and back-end integration works a treat. But how do you ensure that, among the billion or so web pages that now make up the worldwide web, yours comes up among most preferred by surfers when they use search engines?
For any small business determined to use the internet to improve prospects, there can be few greater concerns than how to ensure maximum exposure against a backdrop of the millions of other websites.
To date, retrieving a relevant list of results from a search engine has often felt like a lottery, both for the website being sought and the surfer. However, with the help of a fast-growing phenomenon called web positioning, websites can now directly influence the odds of being on the A-list of retrievals.
Web positioning, or search optimisation as it is often called, is the process of fine-tuning your website to be more attractive to search engines and feature among the most popular or relevant sites retrieved.
The process can range from a concerted webpage submission campaign - automated or manual - to a complete audit of the site, which would examine factors such as browser search engine compatibility, which keywords or strings are used and download speeds, and would then make recommendations accordingly. And there are an increasing number of agencies springing up across the web to provide this service.
But why bother? There are several common sense reasons for considering web positioning, rather than leaving the discovery of your website to chance. But the increasing complexity - arising from constant changes in the size and shape of the internet, making it ever more difficult to track down relevant websites - has to be the most compelling one.
"In the beginning, when you had 500 websites in the UK, you sent your address to Yahoo! and got online almost immediately," acknowledges Gilles Bourdin, vice president of international business development at NetBooster, a French web positioning agency that recently expanded into the burgeoning UK market. "Now things have changed, it's a battle to get visible."
If recent research from IDC is any indication, the battle for visibility is set to get even bloodier. The research claims that more than 80% of surfers use some form of search engine to find specific types of website. Of those, only 20% are inclined to look beyond the first three pages of retrieved listings.
Put that way, it soon becomes imperative that your site features in the top 30 items on the list or runs the risk of cyber-obscurity.
But often, a website can be its own worst enemy. A tendency to overdesign the more recently developed sites can lower the chances of being picked out by a search engine even further.
Overuse of frames, tables and dynamically generated content, to stand out from the dotcom crowd can, ironically, ensure that search engines ignore a site altogether, as they can only read text - their business is to find, index and rank key words used on the web pages.
As far as the search engines are concerned, there is nothing flash about Flash (the web animation software by Macromedia) or JavaScript, because they push keywords and page titles further down the webpage, decreasing their chances of being detected in the process.
In addition, it turns out that different search engines use different, ever-changing criteria for their retrieval process as well as for accepting webpage submissions. Various methodologies are employed by each search engine's "spiders" - the software that trawls across the web to index and rank each site for the retrieval list.
"For example, AltaVista's spiders look for key words when searching for websites, while Excite's spiders look for page titles and the text within web pages," explains Richard McBriar, managing director of UK-based web positioning outfit Target Traffic.
It is precisely this confusion that has given rise to companies such as Target Traffic and NetBooster. Both are dedicated to web positioning, once offered as a subsidiary service by web design and online media agencies.
"Some sites are more difficult to position than others, but none are beyond positioning," says Bourdin at NetBooster, which audits the client website, registers it with chosen search tools and directories and maintains its position on the search list thereafter. It guarantees a presence on the first two pages of listings after a year, for around £7,000 and counts Intershop, LibertySurf and lastminute.com's French subsidiary Degriftour among clients.
Part of NetBooster's three-tier, bespoke service includes the development and submission of "alias" webpages to a number of search engines in place of unsuitable originals. The aliases contain several keywords and page titles that will coincide with the engine's defined categories, while being made to account for the specific indexing methodology applicable to each search engine.
Target Traffic's services, on the other hand, are considerably cheaper and more focused on the small business end of the spectrum. A site audit costs £150 and webpage submissions cost £35 per month.
There are also off-the-shelf webpage submission software packages available, such as Top-pile and Addweb, which fire off a site's webpages to a number of search engines at regular intervals, to be included on their indexes. However, no analysis of the site is carried out, and so there is little guarantee of successful submissions, and there is a high risk of spamming as a result of the constant bombardment, to which the engines do not take kindly.
On the basis of the more pages from your website that you submit to the search engines, the better you will do in them, Top-pile will submit your homepage and four other pages to the top 40 search engines every two weeks for an annual fee of £120. It also supplies an emailed acknowledgement after a submission has been made, a rank tracking report and a monthly tips and advice newsletter. It counts online recruitment site www.netjobs.co.uk among its satisfied customers.
According to Charles Talbot, netJobs' marketing manager, the website now receives 1.5m hits a month and has never advertised offline.
However, IDC also suggests 95% of all searches are covered by just 12 top search engines. On that basis, the above method may seem a bit scattergun. But at that price, and as an alternative to ineffectual banner advertising, it has to be a more sensible - and, in the long run, cheaper - alternative to doing nothing at all.
