Search engine rankings and their impact on your business

The Holy Grail of web marketing professionals is to ensure that the web site they are optimising is always ranked among the top 5 or 10 sites listed by various search engines in response to a search request. In simple terms, they are responsible for their site's search engine rankings. As any web marketing expert will tell you, rankings are important. But they are not the alpha and omega of your web presence. The bottom line is to convert visitors to customers. So it's important that your web site helps achieve that goal. This means designing your web site in ways that attract it to search engines. It also means populating your web site with content that is organised to get picked up by search engines.

Several years ago, when search engines were far less sophisticated than they are today, repeated use of a keyword could help your site get a higher ranking. Not anymore. The relevance of the content, use of related key words, meta data tags are all factors that determine how well your site will do when someone searches for certain keywords relevant to your business.

Your site's search engine rankings are affected by the URL structure, name and how individual pages are named. The number of incoming links and social metrics on various pages too are important determinants. The presence of malware and links from known manipulative sources will adversely impact your site's ranking. Redirects, error pages and the use of scripts can also negatively affect your ranking. Content is increasingly becoming king. If the content on your site is authoritative, informative and well-written, that's a huge bonus. Contrived copy designed to stuff the page with key words will no longer suffice. Duplicate content on the site is also a major "No No", as it can cause a huge drop in traffic to the site, and thus to rankings.

SEO has spawned a huge industry. There is no dearth of "SEO specialists" who offer "guaranteed results" in terms of "top 10" ranks on Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL or other search engines. Be careful. Be very careful. Spend time to understand what your SEO agency's track record has been and exactly how they intend to optimize your site. As in everything else, SEO too has above-board techniques and "black hat" methods. The use of the latter can not only mess up your optimisation efforts and lead to poor search engine rankings, but can also cause serious reputational damage. And that can be far more difficult to get over. The trust of customers is won slowly. But in this age of social media, all it takes is a tweet or two to spread the message. Even on social channels, bad news travels faster.

Most companies use an external service provider to host their web sites. If the server uptime is not 100%, the risk exists that those pages may not be indexed by search engine spiders. That can immediately lead to a drop in rankings. On the other hand, ensuring that your web site is indexed to major social sites will give your search engine rankings a boost.