SEO Update: The scene for 2005

2005 is already proving to be a busy year in the search engine marketing arena. Keeping on top of what is going on is even more difficult, so this month we are focussing on giving you an update on the major search engines, how they are affecting your optimisation campaigns and what you should be doing to ensure continued success in the search engines.

The first major change is the new MSN search engine, which was launched at the end of January. This is a new major player in search, already proving to be competition to the more established search engines of Google & Yahoo. MSN are being aggressive in their promotional campaigns of the search engine, but still have a long way to go. Their algorithm ranks websites quite heavily on content, so to ensure good rankings, your website needs to be focussed on good content, using key phrases that relate to the products and services you are promoting.

This change has also diminished Yahoo’s Search reach. They previously fed natural search results to MSN, now the only results from Yahoo’s empire are via Overture pay per click ads, showing alongside MSN’s search results. MSN are developing their own pay per click search engine, which is due to be rolled out in 2006.

So now who are the major players in search?
You need to focus your optimisation across 4 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN & Ask Jeeves / Teoma. Your optimisation strategy needs to include keyword rich content, optimum navigation of the website for ease of use for visitors and easy indexing for search engines, use of headers on each page (H1 tags in particular), and off site optimisation, which includes an ongoing link building strategy. All of these factors will help with your success in the search engines, as well as ongoing development of your website adding fresh content and generally keeping it updated.

However, all is not as simple as it seems.
Your outlook on your site optimisation must be as a long term, ongoing strategy. This outlook is particularly important with Google. Just to keep you on your toes, Google is now ‘sand boxing’ new websites. This means that new sites that are launched are effectively being put on hold by Google for at least 8 months. Google will come out and index your site, but it will not appear in any search results for at least this length of time. Therefore, if you are planning on developing a brand new website with a brand new domain, then it is probably worth just putting up a holding page about your new site, just so the new domain gets indexed.

Why is Google doing this? Google are continually trying to keep on top of spammers and people using ‘cowboy’ techniques to artificially inflate their rankings. Since Google’s algorithm weighs heavily on the number of incoming links a website has, some websites have been using link farms and questionable techniques, such as multiple doorway pages, to increase their links. Google are attempting to put off sites from doing this by putting them on hold (or ‘sandboxing’ them), since gaining new links ethically takes many months anyway.

This means that gaining good results in Google will take even longer than before. It could mean you will have to include a budget for Google Adwords in order to ensure a presence in the Google Search engine until your site begins to rank well. However, more importantly, you must ensure your search engine marketing is spread over all the major search engines as well as incorporating other online marketing activities. You must never rely on one search engine or one avenue to gain your website traffic. Even if you are enjoying good rankings in all the main search engines, this can change over night with a change to any of the search engines’ algorithms and search marketers never know when this might happen.

So, what other activities should you be doing?
It’s not just the optimisation and link building that’s important, but keeping your website updated. Fresh content and sites that are proactively adding new content about their company, news and other things of interest to visitors will also benefit from higher search engine rankings. So how often you update your site is also crucial to your success in the search engines. Out dated sites, with pages last updated in 2002 will do you no favours. Moreover, the better your site is for potential visitors, the more other websites will naturally link to it.

Get the optimisation basics right, be proactive with the management of your site and update it regularly. You may not see immediate results, but you will in the months ahead.