Simple Changes Increase a Website’s Search Engine Rankings

In a brief three-month engagement, a Shopatron Search Engine Optimization specialist significantly improved a Web site’s visibility on three top search engines.

Introduction

NOTE

A fictional manufacturer brand, Malana Music Company, is used in this article. Although the content is based entirely on real data, Malana Music Company is not a reference to any real company in the music industry or any other industry. Any similarity to an actual brand or company is purely coincidental.

In early 2007, Malana Music Company* launched a new Web site with eCommerce and Content Management, powered by Shopatron. Experiencing a fresh, easy-to-use product catalog on the new site, consumers bought more products and placed orders of higher value than expected. Malana Music’s retailers participated as order fulfillment partners.

Seeing the high volume of consumer orders appreciated by retailers, the marketing team at Malana Music sought ways to increase traffic and sales at their new Web site. With some - but not a lot - of familiarity of online marketing, Malana’s marketers tapped into Shopatron’s online marketing experts for advice.

To demonstrate tangible results at a low cost, a Shopatron online marketing specialist suggested a three-month Search Engine Optimization (SEO) trial program. SEO is a cost effective way to generate additional traffic to a Web site.

SEO Background

A process that takes months, not days or weeks, Search Engine Optimization improves the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines by getting the site ranked (listed) higher for specific keywords searched.

SEO does not involve the Pay Per Click (Sponsored Ads) parts of search engines. SEO is the science of getting higher “free” or “natural” search results for keywords that matter most to Web site visitors.

While the traffic coming from natural search on Google, Yahoo, and MSN is, in fact, free, the optimization of a Web site to produce better natural search results requires regular effort from a person knowledgeable in the science of search engines. To ensure that the work of an SEO is effective, it is essential to measure tangible improvements in the search results.

Unfortunately, as a Web site is optimized, better search results do not occur immediately. This is because search engines have to notice the changes to the optimized site, and other similar sites, before deciding how to re-sort the search results for any keyword or keyword phrase. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN send computerized agents (“spiders”) to visit millions of Web site pages everyday, recording all the information into giant databases. Generally, it takes the major search engines two to four weeks to record the entire Internet.

Because of this, Search Engine Optimization is an online marketing program that can be measured for results about once per month. Web site changes made in January might lead to search result improvements in February. Typically, an SEO specialist spends a certain number of hours per month on optimization, determined by the size of the Web site, the number of keywords to be optimized, and the client’s budget.

In the case of Malana Music, the budget was for thirty hours of SEO specialist effort spread over a three-month initial SEO trial phase. This kept the cost below a single trade magazine advertisement and would be enough to optimize 12 pages and about 100 keywords.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Search engines use dozens of factors to rank Web pages when searching a keyword. These are normally organized into two groups: on-page factors and off-page factors.

On-page factors1 include:

Keyword use in Title tag
Keyword use in body text
Relationship of body text content to keyword (i.e., topic analysis)
Keyword use in H1 tag
Keyword use in domain name

Off-page factors include:

Anchor text of inbound links
Global link popularity of site
Age of site
Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
Topical relevance of inbound links to site

Because Malana Music’s SEO program was limited to a small, finite budget, only on-page factors were optimized. Off-page factors will be added as a subsequent phase of Malana’s ongoing Search Engine Optimization program.

Keyword Research

Every keyword or keyword phrase is subject to competition on a search engine. There are other companies with Web sites that sell similar products, also wanting to be listed highest for keywords related to their products.

Keywords like “music” and “instruments” apply to many products and services and therefore are highly competitive. While many users search on these keywords every day, there are (at least) thousands of Web pages that target these keywords, making it very difficult to rank number one in a natural search result.

More specific terms like “brass instruments” or “stringed instruments” represent more specific subjects and apply to fewer Web sites. Competition is correspondingly lower. As long as more specific keywords can deliver adequate volumes of searches, they usually deliver the best rankings after optimization.

With Malana’s help, we generated a list of 104 keywords and keyword phrases that describe Malana Music’s products and product categories. Using a special keyword research tool, we identified the keywords that had the most potential to improve traffic.

Table 1

Search Volume - Estimated volume of searches for this term on Google
Titles with keyword - The number of Web pages with this keyword in the title
Pages with keyword - The number of Web pages where this keyword is found

Data in Table 1 compares search volume potential with their competition. The keyword phrase “musical instruments” has the highest search volume of the seven keyword phrases, yet it also exists in 4,890,000 title tags across the Web. “Percussion instruments,” on the other hand, has a respectable search volume but exists in the title tag of only 58,400 pages. “Percussion instruments” is a keyword phrase ripe for optimization.

By comparing search volume with competition, we found niche keywords and selected 2 to 4 keywords to target on each page. Figure 1 depicts the way a primary keyword phrase (“Brass Instruments”) and secondary keyword phrases (adding “Valved,” “Slide,” and “Natural” to the same phrase) targets a single page on the site.

Figure 1

Figure 2

On-Page Changes

After selecting our targeted keywords, we began to modify Malana Music’s Web pages to optimize the keywords. The idea was to put the chosen keywords onto pages so that the search engines could find them. The search engines determine, by analyzing the various placements of keywords on the page, how important these keywords must be to the reader of the page.

Figure 2 shows a wire frame of the Malana Music Web site with optimized on-page factors indicated with a yellow outline.

Title Tag

The title tag is the most important factor in ranking Web pages. By placing the target keyword phrase(s) in the title tag, we tell the search engine on which specific words the page is focused. Title tags on all product category pages were modified to contain target keywords.

Header (H1 Tag)

A Header is a Headline: large text usually at the top of a page. The “H1 Tag” is a technical term that describes how a Web site designer indicates in HTML code that a block of text should be displayed large. Search engines consider larger text to be more important on the page than smaller text because people are more likely to read it. The H1 Tag is the largest header size (H6 is the smallest). For Malana Music, we modified the H1 headers to match targeted keywords.

Keyword-rich Links

Text that links to another page on the same Web site is called “anchor text.” When anchor text contains a keyword and links to another page on the same site, the destination page is recognized by search engines as important for that keyword. Malana Music’s anchor text links were modified to match targeted keywords.

Keywork-rich Text

Content is king. On-page text must be ample and rich with keywords to return optimal natural search results. Keyword-rich copy was placed on all product category pages.

Search engines, in particular, rate unique, relevant text most highly. Copying the same text from one page to another is not recognized as unique content and is rated lower. One of the reasons that user-generated content is so important to many sites is that it creates a lot of unique, relevant content without cost and gets those sites highly ranked (e.g., tripadvisor.com’s user reviews).

Meta Description Tag

Meta Description Tags are programmed into the “background” of a Web page. They summarize the general purpose and intent of the page. When search engines display search results, they often display the Meta Description Tag beneath the title of the page, near the link to the site itself. We modified all Malana Music product category page Meta tags to be keyword-rich.

Search Engine Ranking Results

After changing the Malana Music site, we waited for the search engines to pick up the changes. Google was the first to spider the site; ranking improvements were recorded on Google just two weeks after the site changes were made. MSN picked up the site changes after three weeks, and Yahoo took four weeks.

After all the search engines had picked up the changes, we used keyword analysis tools to check the rankings of all 104 keywords. For company-name keywords like “Malana” and “Malana Music,” the search engines had already ranked this site in the number one position before optimization. Most other keywords did not rank anywhere on the first three pages of search results before optimization. After on-page optimization, dozens of search engine placements were gained. A sample of the keyword ranking report is in Table 3.

Table 3

Significant improvements were seen on each major search engine, increasing the number of Top 10 placements. A “placement” is a search engine ranking for a targeted keyword. Figures 3 and 4 display a summary of before-and-after keyword rankings in the top 10 and top 30 search results. The top 30 results are reasonable to monitor because “90% of users click on hits within the first three pages of search results.” 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Increased visibility and higher rankings on search engines brings more traffic to a site. For the targeted term “brass instruments,” significant increases in search engine traffic from this keyword phrase were seen immediately. Figure 5 displays the increase.

Conclusion

In just three months, a Shopatron online marketing specialist was able to significantly improve the rankings of Malana Music’s Web site for a set of targeted keywords. Traffic to the Web site increased, improving the company’s presence on the Internet while driving more sales.

Malana Music Company’s Web site is more visible on search engines than it was before the SEO program. Search engine visibility brings more traffic to the site.

On-page factor optimization delivered tangible results in a short period of time with a minimal effort. Further optimization will further increase rankings. Both on-site factors and off-site factors can be a part of Malana Music’s ongoing program. The acquisition of links that point to Malana’s site is currently underway as part of a Phase II off-site factor optimization effort. These link acquisitions will support and complement the on-page factor optimization outlined in this report.