What is the World Wide Web?

How many people have not understood anything about the internet because it has been wrapped in an aura of mystery since its inception.

I have had a few customers who have been misled by or confused by explanations regarding the way the web works and the way that websites operate. I will try to explain it here - as I understand it!

In some respects the web is like a telephone directory in that by typing in a www. followed by the domain name you are almost dialling a number. This is the ip address of your domain or website if you prefer. Your website sits on a server. A server is basically a computer which is always on line  ( Don't get me started on when the server goes down!) so has an open connection. This means that when you type in the 'number' the website responds and 'answers the call'  Your website has to sit on the server like a car in a garage and this must be paid for as you 'rent your space' This rental is called 'hosting' and is payable on an annual basis.

Incidentally, contrary to popular belief, you do not own your domain name. You rent it from one of the authorities set up to administrate them. For example, a .co.uk domain name is rented from Nominet. This means that if you do not keep your payments up the domain will expire and could be rented by someone else! People often obtain their domain from their website designer but I can assure you that it comes from Nominet.

How the Search Engines work

There are now numerous search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN being the biggest and most famous.

Basically, as I understand it the search engines constantly scan the net looking at websites. The search engines are a type of intelligent database that in milliseconds can look at their records and decide which websites meet the criteria of the search term. So when someone types in 'bed and breakfast rye' billions of records are searched to find ones that the search engines feel match the criteria.

So far so awe inspiring! However, this is when it starts to get complicated. The search engines often use different criteria when it comes to deciding which websites they decide to show and the order in which they show them.

In general, it is fair to say that the search engines are looking for relevance of content to the search term entered i.e. 'bed and breakfast rye' will need to appear in some form on the site in order for it to be considered.

However, as a lot of the criteria relates to other factors then your results may not be as relevant as you might think. In other words there are places called Rye in both Australia and the USA so results can be confused. There may be some strong sites where the word Rye has no relationship to the place or is mentioned as being not far away. In general, the search engines are a lot better now but only a couple of years ago you would get a lot of results relating to the book 'a catcher in the rye'

There is a school of thought that says you have to optimise differently for different search engines and when I started doing that 6 years ago I optimised for what I'd read Google wanted. The result was that I had spectacular success....with Yahoo!

My own experience is that they are mostly looking for the same things and I do not optimise differently for different engines.

Search Engine Myths

When you have a new website and submit it to a search engine the delay before they recognise it and add it to their database can be as much as 6 months. Your customers can still view the site but will need to enter the full www. address in the top of the browser.

As a result of this a lot of companies are offering to resubmit your site every month. The search engines do not like this and could drop your site altogether. In fact, at any time in the future they could drop your site for unknown factors although they normally base inclusion into their search engines on a mixture of popularity and ranking etc.

Beware of the companies that charge for giving you an S.E.O. report on how well your site is optimised. The software for this is freely available on the web and this report is literally a click of a button. The relevance of the report will depend upon the ability of the software designers to keep pace with search engine developments - dodgy! It is fair to say that some of the basics will help a bit but you can probably get this for nothing by searching the web.

Links

Even I get confused about the success and relevance of links so I shall start with a couple of 'roughly true' statements.

Natural Reciprocal Links are good!

If you swap links with friends, companies and associated businesses then that is not a bad thing. Try not to add them all at the same time or the search engines software will assume that you are carrying out bad link building and could penalise you. I would suggest not more than 3 links a month? Some 'experts' suggest that two way links cancel each other out in the search engines software.

One way links are better!

Again, using related companies having one way links to your site are better because some search engines think you must be important if other sites want to link to you without you having to link back.

Most, if not all of this search engine analysis is done automatically by software so it will decide, based on whatever has been programmed into it, that your perfectly legal link building is done using 'illegal methods' like you are paying for it! Also if you have too many outgoing links then it will assume that you are a link farm and therefore penalised.

Paid for links are bad?

I don't know how true this is or whether its 'blarney' put out by the search engines to put you off. There is no doubt that incoming links are generally good news paid for or not.

Advertising on the Web

There are many ways in which you can actually promote your site on the web apart from the obvious method of optimising. Most of the search engines have an advertising programme you can join but we will concentrate on Google's Pay Per Click programme Adwords.

Basically, you join the campaign, choose your key words and specify a bid rate and daily maximum. It is quite simple and potentially very expensive!

Lets say, using our example of 'bed and breakfast rye' you sign up and bid 10p per click for every time someone clicks on your advert - usually displayed at the top or right hand side of the search engines results page. The first problem is that 10p per click won't get you on the first page of the results. If there are other advertisers then it could cost you 20p or more per click. I had one client, for a popular search term, and it cost nearly £5.00 per click. He had a luxury ski chalet in Meribel. This brings us to the second problem. A year or so ago Google introduced a 'benefit' to advertisers in that they would take your search terms and in a flexible manner show them for all kinds of phrases related to your original key words. In this case one of the 'Google' relevant terms was 'cheap accommodation meribel' My customer paid nearly £5.00 for that and it does not take a genius to work out that the potential client was not going to book! You can set a daily maximum of how much you want to spend but this could still mount up. Another problem is that your competitors could sit there clicking on your link and cost you money.

I am not saying that Adwords is useless but it needs to be treated with care.

Other methods of advertising included in the 'bed and breakfast rye' example is paying for inclusion in bed and breakfast directories that already appear high for relevant search terms. The downside being that you could be part of a list which contains most of your competitors. The cost though should be in the region of £50 to £100 per year which is better value for money than Adwords in my opinion.

Meta Tags / Key Words

These are part of the 'hidden' code on your website.

In the early days web designers discovered that if they stuffed the meta tags/key words full of relevant words related to the search terms then the chances of their sites coming up was pretty good and after a while a series of what became known as 'black hat techniques' were evolved. This included using hidden text and landing pages as well as auto redirects. I don't propose to go into detail about these techniques, as most designers and optimisers have used them at one time or another - except to say that the search engines caught on pretty quickly and devised methods to automatically detect them and penalise the sites concerned by dropping them from their databases.

One often expressed complaint by many optimisers is that Google, in particular, states that it will penalise you for all sorts of these techniques but also reserves the right to penalise your site for unspecific things that it just does not like. This makes the average optimisers life somewhat interesting!

Page Ranking

Ok. I will start with a statement that will cause huge disagreement. 'Page ranking by Google does not guarantee high positioning for search terms.'

I have carried out a lot of research with my own and my customers sites. I have got some sites that were only 3 weeks old appearing on page 1 for a number of good quality search phrases. Likewise, I have some reasonably ranked sites PR3 which don't do as well so I can't see the relationship between page rank and position. Some of this can depend on how well optimised a certain category of search is. I do lot of work in the accommodation industry and there is a lot of professional optimising going on. Despite this I can still have an impact although with a more obscure industry where little optimising is done I can have an even greater impact more quickly. Page rank seems to play no part in this equation.

Optimising

So, when you have your site professionally optimised, how much does it cost?

This depends upon who you go to and what they claim.

For Example:

There are companies who will charge a set up fee and then a monthly ongoing charge to maintain position. They may not accomplish much either. There are others who will charge a one-off fee and make no guarantees.

Quite frankly, I make no guarantees either. Only a fool would guarantee something that don't have complete control over. I make a reasonable one off charge and would then review the situation on an annual basis to see what else could be done.

Before I can quote somebody I will need a lot of detail about what they have and what they want. Even then I will not give guarantees but will at least refer them to other customers of mine who have taken the risk!

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