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by Christopher Hart, February 17, 2009

In conversations with potential clients, I have often heard bottom-line, just-the-facts questions such as these:

• How long will it take before I see results?
• What is the ROI of search engine optimization?
• What is the business value of SEO?

In order to explain the true scope of the questions being asked and why such questions about the value of search engine optimization are so complicated to answer, I will draw parallels between a typical executive’s traditional work experiences and the new online business environment.

How Long Will It Take Before I See Results?

The Traditional Business Experience

Think back to the first days of your first job, or for that matter, your first days at any new job. Remember how overwhelmed you may have been, not knowing where anything was in your office or who to go to for each issue. Then, just as soon as you thought you had the hang of things, you discovered that seemingly simple decisions were made more complicated by office politics. Choices that appeared obvious turned out to be misaligned with the company environment, market conditions or an executive’s point of view. Eventually, through the course of conversations and trial and error, you slowly got into the flow of things. You became more prepared as you adjusted to the new environmental conditions. These adjustments allowed you to make quicker, more informed decisions.

The Online Business Experience

The standard answer for how long an SEO campaign will last is “forever”. Search engine optimization is something that must be done as long as you’re doing business online. But, to answer the more pressing question of how long an SEO campaign must be in place before results occur, an executive must ask a number of questions of themselves and their organization:

• Has every member of executive management gotten behind the SEO initiative and told the rest of the organization of SEO’s importance and of your commitment?
• Does the executive management understand that each individual’s commitment is required (and expected) for online success?
• How long will it take all employees to learn and embrace this new business model?
• Do all employees understand the consequences of SEO failure and commit to this new initiative? Are they a part of the solution, or will they be a problem?
• Will executives support the alignment of the offline production process so it is properly aligned with the online business process?

The length of time an SEO campaign lasts is not absolute — SEO must become part of the online way of life. However, a company’s executives are able to accelerate the organization into a position where planning, development and reaction to environmental changes are easily done. How long it takes is in great part dependant upon the ability of the executive team to hold true to this initiative. If it is unimportant to you, then it is unimportant to the company. An important point is that if you can lead the entire organization to support search engine marketing and SEO in all that they do, the synergistic effect is a rapid acceleration of your online presence beyond that of your competition.

What is the ROI of Search Engine Optimization?

The Traditional Business Experience

Currently you have collected data points from your offline business and built them into a business formula. This formula has been developed over time and is relative to the marketplace you currently reach through your current distribution methods. On top of this formula you apply your education, on the job knowledge and intuition. These are all things you have taken time to learn, absorb and turn into decision making qualifications. So in the end, return and ROI are based largely on your ability to make decisions from knowledge of topic and historical data from said business line.

The Online Business Experience

Just as you need well established data points to develop an estimate of an offline business return, so too do you need such data points to estimate the return of an online business initiative. In many cases, until we have begun a project with you, we are not exposed to such data points. It is also usually the case that most new online businesses are not collecting and tracking the proper data points required for any online return estimates to be made. On top of that there is the unknown variable of how long it will take to educate your staff so they are able to make proper decisions once the online data is presented to them. As you can see, without data or an educated staff, there is no way to provide an exact number.

What Is the Business Value of SEO?

The Traditional Business Experience

In your traditional offline business, value is recognized over time and is largely based on the return you receive. The value of traditional marketing is assessed by collecting data from a number of points that somehow reflect your business’s success.

The Online Business Experience

If at this point in time you and your competition are not engaging in SEO, you will see that as soon as you integrate the new media business mentality into your business model, the value of search engine optimization will be obviously clear. If your competition has already started down the SEO path, then you are late to the game. You will likely need to expend at least twice as much energy to catch up. Whether you are looking to jump ahead of the pack or trying to close the gap on a competitor that is pulling away, the value of SEO should not be overlooked.

In the end, it is YOU — the business executive, the person in the finance department, the director of marketing, the IT manager — who has to embrace the difference in doing business online. And it is your commitment to a successful online business model that will make or break the value of SEO within your company.

Internet and search engine marketing is not a fad or a short term project; it is a cultural business evolution!

My best advice is to stop clinging to the traditional business model and embrace a new and different way of thinking. If you take the time to let your SEO consultant teach you, to energize and set vision for your organization, and to maintain momentum, then the answers to your questions will become self evident in short order. SEO will change your corporate life.

But the commitment is required on your end first.

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There is a new concept being talked about in the web marketing industry. This new paradigm, dubbed the 80/20 rule of search, has sprung out of the realization that many of the earlier beliefs about search engine marketing are no longer true, or perhaps were never true in the first place.

When they were first introduced to search engine marketing (SEM), many marketers believed that with this innovative new concept, web marketing could be handled solely through the use of technology, and that human interaction wasn’t necessary in producing successful online campaigns. However, after results fell short time and again, these marketers were forced to take a second look at their original ideas.

Marketers are now learning that words like “autopilot” and “set it and forget it” are no more than advertising ploys used by companies that simply don’t understand what it takes to manage search effectively.

The new belief is that for SEM to live up to its promise, it is time for a completely new model – the 80/20 rule of search. The idea behind this rule is that:

• 20% of the success of a paid search program is rooted in technology; and
• 80% of the success of a paid search program is derived from a human component.

20% – Technology’s Role in the Process

There are three areas where technology is crucial in search engine marketing:

1. Gathering and sorting huge amounts of data from numerous engines. This includes information on impressions, clicks, number of conversions, and dollar value of conversions. All of this gives us the ability to capture information for every keyword/search engine combination.
2. Calculating important ROI metrics based on the data collected such as ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend); CTA (Cost To Acquire); CPL (Cost Per Lead); and CPO (Cost Per Order).
3. Producing a wide range of reports, including top-level summary reports, detailed trend analysis, grouped keyword analysis, and individual keywords.

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The Other 80% – The Role of Human Intelligence

The 80% human component in the equation consists of marketers who interpret data and market conditions to make the best possible bidding decisions. These qualitative contributions involve developing expansive and relevant keyword sets as well as call-to-action marketing communications. They also include creating succinct landing pages that meet the expectations of search engine users and set consumers on the conversion path.

Keyword Development
Automated tools can certainly offer ideas for keyword development, but intuitive thinking is an essential factor in developing a robust keyword list. Just a few of the various issues to consider are product and brand names, synonyms, misspellings, singular and plural forms, features, benefits, and competitors.

Search Term Copywriting
Writing ads for search engines involves a combination of art and science that cannot be emulated by technology. One must adhere to the strict rules enforced by search engines while still drawing the reader in with a tempting promotion. Successful ads accomplish two goals: 1) encourage customers to click on your ad rather than your competitors’ ads, and 2) discourage non-qualified consumers who are not interested in your product or service. This task is not easy given that it must be achieved with three lines of text and no graphics.

When the proper marketing communication strategy is applied, the highest quality site traffic is delivered to your website with the greatest likelihood of conversion.

Destination Page Analysis
One of the biggest and most frequent errors made by companies in paid search engine marketing is consistently sending all searches to their home page or to pages that are totally irrelevant to the search term. Today’s web-users expect relevant information when they click on an ad, and when they do not receive it they quickly move on to their next option, which is usually your competition.

Review of Multiple Variables When Making Bidding Decisions
Each company must establish its own complex set of rules in making bid and position decisions. It is important to remember that being #1 isn’t always the right choice; often times dropping down in position makes more sense. Bid setting is not just about price, it’s more about relevant position. There are multiple variables that must be reviewed prior to making bidding decisions. Marketers must analyze the types of competitors listed above and below them on a search engine, the various marketing messages of competitors, the ROI effects of raising bids and conversely, of lowering bids, they must perform a historical position analysis, and they must consider the impact of affiliates, resellers and other third parties.

Conclusion
While the all-technology solution for paid search is clearly enticing because it involves less work and seems more cost-effective, the reality is that today’s technology is only capable of covering 20% of the requirement for an effective campaign. Technology is limited because it relies solely on quantitative factors and is unable to consider qualitative factors such as consumer search intentions, marketing copy triggers, and irrelevant landing page content.

That’s why it is imperative that the other 80% of a successful SEM program includes the human element. The result is a powerful combination of the complex intelligence of the human brain and cutting-edge technology. Apply this rule in your online marketing endeavors and you’ll soon benefit from the truly extraordinary power of the web.

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While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn’t as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.

1. Send out the Web Crawlers
   Search engines use invisible “bots” or “spiders,” which are really programs or automated scripts, that browse (or “crawl”) the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. This type of technology is necessary because the rate at which people create new Internet documents greatly exceeds any manual indexing capacity. In fact, an estimated 20 billion web pages exist, and search engines have crawled about half of them.
2. Index the Pages
   After a spider crawls a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds it to its database. This process is known as indexing. With so many search queries submitted each minute, it is very important that search engines are steadfast in their index management so that they can search and sort billions of documents in fractions of a second.
3. Process Queries
   Search engines process hundreds of millions of search queries every day. When someone keys in a search term and clicks “Search,” the engine retrieves from its index all of the documents that match the query. It determines a match by finding the same terms or phrase entered into the search bar. Entering a multi-word phrase by itself can return literally millions of results, but entering that same phrase in quotes can greatly narrow the results, giving the user a more accurate listing of websites that relate to their particular search.
4. Rank Pages
   A very closely guarded mathematical equation, called an algorithm, is employed by each search engine to determine how to sort and rank search query results. This algorithm allows the engine to rank the most relevant web pages first, and the rest in descending order of importance to the user.

What You Can Do for Your Website: Avoid Speed Bumps & Walls

You may not know it, but you could be hindering or preventing your website from being crawled by search engine spiders. As spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may act as “speed bumps” in the process by slowing down the spiders. Even worse, data that cannot be accessed by web crawlers are really like “walls” in that they completely prevent your web pages from being ranked.

Beware of the Following “Speed Bumps”:

• URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
• Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
• Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
• Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
• Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Beware of the Following “Walls”:

• Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
• Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
• Documents accessible only via a search box
• Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
• Pages requiring a login
• Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website’s contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It’s also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.

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Canonicalization is the process that search engines use to determine the best URL or website address when several different choices exist. This is a common issue that is predominantly related to home page files at the root level. In other words, the following URL’s all appear to be the same for a web user:

www.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/
www.yourdomain.com/index.shtml
yourdomain.com/default.asp

On the other hand, search engines view the above URL’s as different pages. Web servers sees each URL differently and treats each independently, therefore each of the above URL’s could display different content if desired. When a search engine attempts to –canonicalize– a URL, it tries to choose the best page to represent the website.
The simplest way to discover if you are experiencing this issue would be to perform a search using part of the content found on your homepage. If one then one result appears, on the search engine result pages, you may want to correct this issue using a 301 redirect on your web server. The 301 redirect will instruct the search engine as to which URL you desire to be “canonical.” The 301 redirect will perform a permanent redirect to the specified URL as seen in the sample below:
User types address into their browser:

http://yourdomain.com

The 301 redirect will redirect any request to the specified address:

http://www.yourdomain.com

I have seen countless websites displaying the same content on two or more different URL’s. Search engines penalize duplicate content causing problems and poor performance for the site owners while obtaining organic rankings. The funny thing is most website owners don’t know this pertains to their sites.

DMO.

David Montalvo is the CEO of UnReal Web Marketing LLC. He has achieved over 15,000 top 10 positions for Fortune 500 companies since 1997.

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But why is SEO so critical to the success of your business online? The holy grail for online marketers centers around getting your site on the first page of a Google search results page. Why Google? Because it currently owns well over half the market of all searches. If you further optimize your site in such a way that it brings in quality traffic, you’ll get the ultimate return on your investment (assuming you have a solid back office process). And if you’ve optimized well for Google, you’ll rank well in the other major search engines, such as Yahoo! and MSN, as well.

Many people hire professional consultants to perform SEO, while others attempt to do it themselves, which you certainly can—it’s not brain surgery. In the coming months, I’ll help you learn how to take on this task yourself. There really are no secrets—it just takes a lot of continuous work and an understanding of people, search engines, algorithms and toolsets.

SEO can (and should) be a full-time engagement. The scope of work depends on your site and your niche. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll need to spend 40 hours a week on it–you certainly couldn’t afford to put that much effort into it–but you need to put a solid content and link-building strategy in place for the long term. Existing sites can be optimized by simply applying a correct title (the text that shows up in the blue bar at the top of your browser window) and a meta description (the text that often shows up as the description in the results listing).

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If you’ve read the book Art of War, you’ll know that the basis for going into battle is to know your competition first. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, the saying goes. In our SEO battlefield, we’ll look at competitive analysis and keyword research to start.

A critical first step for an effective SEO plan is to perform heavy competitive analysis. In fact, if you search in Google for a key term or phrase related to your field and website, you should look at the first three to five websites that come up on the first page of your Google search results. These folks are the ones to beat. That’s because if you’re listed in the top 10 search results in Google, you may find that your website will get significantly increased traffic (assuming you have a competitive search term). I’ll talk about how to get quality traffic and tracking/conversion in a future article.

It’s also critical that your website be built in such a way that it’s search-engine friendly but also user-friendly. To begin with, you must be very clear about what your site is all about. Do you know what your “value proposition” is? Then you’ll want to ensure easy navigation, a clear call to action and relevant content. When you add relevant content pages and links within your theme and community, you’re taking the first steps to success.

You must also make sure it loads quickly, is html/css (cascading style sheets) compliant, and lets visitor know what your site is all about in less than eight seconds. Even if you think your visitors are familiar with your product or service, you’ll still want to make it easy to navigate and user friendly.

SEO is one of the most powerful online marketing mediums there is, and it’s critical to the success of your online business. The bottom line is, SEO done right can enable you to be found and ranked well in the sea of billions of existing web pages, and your visitors and your bank account will both love you for it.

Jon Rognerud is a recognized authority on the subject of search engine optimization and has spent more than 15 years developing websites and marketing solutions at companies like Overture and Yahoo!. His website provides a wealth of informative articles, resources and complimentary e-mail courses on everything you’ll ever need to know about SEO and search marketing.

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