What Makes People Click: Search Engines

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in March. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
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Search engines and optimization

Search engines vary in different ways. If you type the same three words, say, "study English USA":, into ten different search engines, each will give a different set of listings, and order them differently. Each has an algorithm, or formula, to determine where to place the sites their "crawlers" have found. Google's algorithm has always placed a premium on "popularity"; in other words, the more sites are linked to your site, and the more important those sites are, the more important your site is assumed to be. And Google, because it delivered important sites prominently, has revolutionized the search world (as of this writing, in the US), bringing profound changes to both the search industry and the wider world (1). In addition, Yahoo now uses Google's technology for its search, and this is important, because many of our students like Yahoo, which is primarily a portal that allows them to go back and forth between languages easily.

Search engines consider other things important too; for example, the title of your page; subtitles and internal titles; whether its links go to important places; whether its links are dead, whether the page has been changed at all recently; and of course, the pure number of occurrences of the words that were searched for, in this case, "study", "english", and "usa". They don't generally worry about whether the word is capitalized or not; some search for plurals as well as singular (for example, they will find "students" when you typed "student"); some will adjust to misspellings while others won't; and they will often ignore small words like "in" and "the".

Optimization

Optimization, or optimisation across the ocean, is the art of getting your site to the top of a pure search of words. If we have done this well, our site will be on the first page, perhaps even ranked first, whenever a student anywhere types those three or similar words into a search engine anywhere in the world. In order to be successful, we must, first, understand the algorithms, and second, act in order to improve our rankings in the eyes of various engines, which of course are carrying out a variety of searches at any given time.

The optimization industry has evolved considerably from its early days. To put it bluntly, there have always been people who were willing to invest money and resources into figuring out how search engines worked, then making their clients or their business succeed using the given algorithms. Their tactics were sometimes illegal, and included devices like cloaking and link farms (2). A few years ago I told webmasters to pay close attention to their metatags; now they are almost useless, since it is so easy for optimizers to manipulate them to make their pages appear to be about subjects they are not about. The following are ways you can optimize, both effective and ineffective.

Metatags

These days, metatags are considered to be "dead", i.e. useless to the optimizer. This is a stunning development, since two years ago I was harping on the need to improve and maximize one's metatags. The "keyword" metatags allowed you to name important subjects on the unseen, coded part of your webpage; therefore, you could put words like "ingles" in there, hoping a Spanish webcrawler would find you, while not putting it on your actual page. It was a huge game, and the search engine people got tired of it, and just for the most part eliminated consideration of metatags from their algorithms altogether (3). There is one caveat to this, however, and that is that the "description" metatag, which allows you to write a sentence describing your page, is still important. This used to appear under the title when the search engine displayed your page, so it was very important in terms of how people first encountered your page and its purpose. It no longer appears there now, for Google and its followers (4)., but still appears there for some search engines in some places. Be careful when writing these; they can be written succinctly, or written poorly, but if they are ignored, these search engines will sometimes simply copy the first line or two of text and put them in that spot. And I would also say that these algorithms could change again at any moment. The metatag system was designed to be helpful, and could be, if it weren't being constantly exploited by businesses and others for their own advantage. If they go back to being simple descriptors, the search engines will probably find them useful again. By the way, companies like Google keep these algorithms secret, for obvious reasons (5).

Keywords

So how do you get your school to appear at the top of these search engines (it has to be in the top seven for Google; the top twenty for Yahoo, etc., but please not on page 10; nobody gets that far, or at least, almost nobody). First, imagine the words your prospective student might use to find his/her ideal English program. These are your target words. Put them in your page titles; in the section titles; in all your secondary pages; for example, the ones where you describe your faculty or your town. Keep them in mind with whatever you make. Do some research so you can refine your list and improve your perception about what words people are actually using to find programs (6).

Soliciting Links

Google's insistence on developing this has led to an interesting phenomenon: webmasters have begun writing to each other, asking others to link to them, perhaps offering them a link in return. This has become a kind of networking system; the more aggressive people are obviously mastering it and reaping the benefits. The most obvious way to make people link to you is to provide a service better than others do, or to provide one that no one else does; in the rush to do this, people will make the web a better and more useful place. So, you can either curse Google for making you do a lot of extra work, or, you can thank them for helping to make the web a better place. Either way, your job is the same: start making useful pages, and letting people know about them. Don't be ashamed to ask for links. Everyone is doing it!

Submitting

One strategy is to submit to every search engine you can find. I have to admit that I'm a little leery of this one. For one thing, the engines are aware that this can be manipulated and they tend to devalue the sites that are promoted aggressively. Some even punish you for it, according to gossip in the industry.

There is one case that merits submitting, almost certainly. If you have made a foreign language page, directly off your English page, but with no links to other pages in that language, then crawlers in that language will have no way to find it, unless you submit it. You can have faith, say, that the English Google will find your French page and put it in the French-Google bin, but it may and it may not, and this won't help in the case of a French-only search engine. In my opinion, if you've made a French page, and know it's good, submit it to all the French engines. It won't hurt. I can't say that I know this from experience; if in fact there are language "firewalls," I'm not sure how they work.

Commercial Listings

Much has been made of the commercialization of search engines in the last few years, and sure enough, even Google now has paid listings on the right, while Yahoo has them right on top, above the ones that made it to the top by beating the algorithm (7). And some ESL schools have advertised with paid listings. Some of the directories have advertised there also, hoping to draw traffic onto their site, where they then would point the prospective student to the perfect school, getting a small fee for the service. Are these worth it? Well, have you priced the print media recently? I think in terms of advertising dollars, this may be a relative bargain (8). Earlier fears that paid listings would take over the search world were unfounded; people didn't care for that kind of commercial search and voted with their feet. So now the engines have taken to putting them there discreetly and hoping to make some money off of them....after all, where else could they make any money at all?

Keeping track

It's most helpful if you are monitoring your own traffic, keeping track of where your visitors have been, and how they found you. This way you'll know how many hits are coming from any given source. We at the moment can't, but would like to. Again, the glory of the computer is that interest generated by advertising is measurable, and quantifiable. You may think that web advertising is like the wild west, and it is, in terms of its general anarchy and disorder, but it will eventually be much crisper than the print media for this exact reason: that what is good will be proven good, and what is bad will die. Unlike, say, bad television commercials, which seem to hang around forever.

Footnotes

1. Google's takeover of the world's search functions has been to different degrees in different places, but has been profound and complete nevertheless. Most people agree that its success has been due to the fact that it delivers important sites to searchers, making their search quest easier and faster. Not to be underrated is its simple uncluttered design, which should provide a lesson to all designers. One profound change brought by Google's complete mastery of the search industry is a loss of privacy; the word "googling" has come to mean finding out all information that is available about a particular subject. Be forewarned: it's a different world!

2. It's been a cat-and-mouse game from the beginning, since the search engines are more interested in delivering relevant information to searchers, while commercial optimizers have been more interested in just using the system to promote their clients. But entire careers have been made from just figuring out the algorithms (see Da Vanzo, 2002).

3. At one point I realized that I had the word "study" in our metatags, since our main page was primarily about a program we offered for people to study English. However, nowhere in the main page did the word "study" appear. I believe that some search engines were actually punishing us for this....on the assumption that we were exploiting the system and callously trying to draw unwarranted traffic to our site. In one famous incident in the early days, some European English school put "Berlitz" in their metatags, hoping to siphon some of Berlitz Language School's traffic in their direction, but they were caught, and many similar cases ended up in court, resolved by judges who were still, in essence, figuring out what metatags were and why anyone cared.

4. Now Google displays the sentence that the word is in, showing the word in bold. This gives the marketer an interesting possibility, but I haven't seen people successfully exploit it. The idea would be to make the sentences that use the key words as consistently seductive as possible.

5. In fact, Google has become like a cult, with its energy devoted to defeating the adage, "Information seeks to be free."

6. I leave it to your imagination to determine what kind of research. Some are more successful than others. The information is certainly available, since every search is recorded somewhere, and then becomes part of a huge body of data of which statistical analysis is almost certainly possible, if not easy. But the search companies are not giving this stuff away, as far as I know. A more direct route is simply to ask people: If you were to search for a program, what words would you use? Ask as many as you can.

7. A paid listing at Yahoo is going for about $299/year, as of this writing.

8. It's a matter of pride in the optimization industry that a high listing in the directory is by nature better than a paid listing, since searchers have developed a nose for the commercial, and tend to value the genuinely important over those who paid to be there. But for those who don't have time to study the optimization game, a paid listing is one way to get your name in front of a significant number of eyes, and marketing is being in the right place at the right time.

Sources used:

Bruemmer, P. J. (2001, June 7). Optimizing for International Search Engines. ClickZ Network.
http://www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/843331

Da Vanzo, P. (2002). Interview with Chris Ridings. Searchengineblog.com. http://www.searchengineblog.com/interviews/interview_chris_ridings.htm.

SearchDay (2002, October 30). Anatomy of a Search Engine: Inside Google. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1030-in-google.html

Sullivan, D. (2002, Oct. 9). Yahoo parners with Google, changes Results. Search Engine Watch, Oct. 9. http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/10-yahoo.html

Sullivan, D. (2002, July 11). 131 (Legitimate) link-building strategies. Search Day. http://sewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0711-linktips-long.html.

Sullivan, D. (2002, Dec. 5). Revisiting Meta Tags. The Search Engine Report.
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/12-meta.html

Sullivan, D. (2002, Oct. 1). Death of a Meta Tag. The Search Engine Report.
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/10-meta.html

Ward, E. (n.d.). A Linking Campaign Primer. The Link Mensch. http://www.ericward.com/articles/primer.html.

More recent sources:

Thieme, L. (2003). Stung by unethical search engine optimization - a true story. Search Day, March 18. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/03/sd0318-thieme.html.

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Search engines and optimization

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web