- The Definition of Search Engine Compatibility

A search engine compatibility review is a detailed overview and analysis of your site's performance in the search engines and your site's overall search engine compatibility.

A fundamental to ensuring that your website appears in the search engine listings is making sure that search engine "spiders" can successfully "crawl" your website's pages to include them in the search listings.

A search engine spider is an automated web browser that must interpret your page's HTML code, just like a regular browser does. However, spiders are very unsophisticated web browsers, incompatible with many modern web technologies - such as frames, javascript and Flash, to name a few. These incompatible technologies are commonly referred to as "traps".

Many websites are unintentionally designed with built-in search engine traps, severely limiting the search engine spiders' ability to read essential data on your website. This can be particularly detrimental if many or all of the website's links are contained within these traps. If a spider can't read your links, then it can't crawl your website.

Search engine optimization is often neglected during the website design process, when developers are focused on navigation, usability, and branding. As a result, many websites launch with fundamental problems which can be much harder to correct once the site is complete. Yet, many companies wait until their site fails to appear in the search engine listings before seeking expert advice.

The Search Engine Compatibility Review is also a major step in our search engine optimisation services for all clients and is also available as a stand-alone product for companies who would like to know how to make their site compatible with search engines, with a view to optimising it themselves.

Depending on the complexity of a web site, a Search Engine Compatibility Review may be required before we can accurately provide a quotation for the full search engine optimisation of your site.

Let us review your existing website for common traps and other factors that could be hindering your search engine ranking.

- So what is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization, also known as placement and positioning, is the process of improving a web site for higher search engine rankings. It's the first step in achieving higher rankings. Only after optimization can you submit a site and hope for good results.

- The Value of Search Engine Optimization

Over the past couple of years, one of the most important questions about the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) is the value and profitability it can yield for a company. Fortunately, many reputable third parties have conducted extensive surveys and released their findings for public consumption; comparing search marketing performance to other popular marketing and advertising vehicles:

• According to research from Georgia Tech, 85% of Internet users find websites and products through search engines. In fact, nearly 55% of online purchases originate from search.
• U.S. Bancorp's Piper Jaffray has estimated the average cost to acquire a new customer is:
• Search Engine Optimization - $8.50 per new customer
• Yellow Page Advertising - $20 per new customer
• Email Marketing - $60 per new customer
• Direct Mail Campaigns - $70 per new customer
• Acquisition costs for television advertising were not available, due in part to the inability to track ROI.
• Piper Jaffray also reported on the costs associated with lead generation:
• Search Engine Optimization - $0.29/lead
• Email Marketing - $0.50/lead
• Yellow Page Advertising - $1.18/lead
• Banner Advertising - $2.00/lead
• Direct Mail Campaigns - $9.94/lead
• A July 2005 MarketingSherpa IT Benchmark Study received feedback from over 800 IT marketers about the most effective lead generation strategies out of 18 mainstream practices. It found:
• The most effective lead generation practice was in person seminars/road shows (33% of respondents communicated it was very effective).
• The second most effective lead generation strategy was search engine optimization (25% of respondents communicated it was very effective). The value of search engine optimization has proven itself to be a "must-do," when it comes to lead generation in all industries.
• Paid Search Advertising (or PPC) came in seventh in the study.

The sheer act of a search is one of, if not, the most direct methods a user/buyer can make. The customer is asking for your product, service, or company offering. No other marketing medium can provide this type of qualified buyer, in such quantity. The ability to be in front of individuals who are requesting information is a marketer's dream. Why not make that dream a reality and organically position your company's website atop the major search engines?
Welcome search with open arms.
As high-speed Internet adoption continues to increase on American soil and as Google, Yahoo, MSN and others continue the race for international dominance, the value of search engines is destined to become greater for companies competing in the online marketplace. If your company's marketing and advertising strategies just aren't cutting the mustard and are stagnant look to search engine optimization to fuel its success. Your customers are searching for you...are they finding you?

- The ROI from Search Engine Optimization

Results can be achieved is as little as 3-6 months, yielding a dramatic increase of 50% or more in visitors to the web site, which translates into increased product sales and/or leads, and the results are 100% measurable.
Can we confidently predict the ROI for future SEO campaigns? Well, maybe. The simplest possible formula that could be used to predict ROI for proposed SEO campaigns may look like this:
Predicted ROI = (Anticipated revenue from SEO efforts) - (Proposed cost of SEO project)
Unfortunately, it is not that easy to come up with these variables. Tackling "anticipated revenue" first, we encounter a variety of problems. Revenue should take into account all conversions from traffic derived from organic listings, as when we measure current SEO.
One problem is predicting the number of searches for each organic listing to be optimized. The next major issue is predicting the actual ranking - number one, two or five - and how to match the potential click-through rate (CTR) based on unknown positions. It is highly likely that a number one ranking returns a greater CTR than number five, but the number five must nevertheless not be ignored. Additionally, how can you assign a specific value to some types of conversions? Lastly, the effects of SEO may not be fully realized until well into the second year or beyond. How are these "latent" conversions accounted for in the prediction?

Although there are many keyword prediction tools, the primary tool used by our team is WordTracker, which provides an estimate of daily searches for specified terms. We know that this is not the most dependable prediction, but it can act as a guideline for many general terms. Some account managers choose to ignore these numbers, especially when analyzing SERPs for terms and finding multiple paid search competitors that are bidding exact or standard match instead of broad match. If there are people bidding on a long tail term, chances are that it drives traffic, regardless of the fact that WordTracker may claim zero searches per day in its predictive function.
There are other more robust keyword estimators, a category known as "competitive intelligence tools," such as Keyword Max, Trellian, Hitwise, and qSearch from ComScore. It would likely be a wise investment to buy a license for one or more of these products should you attempt to predict ROI for a proposed SEO campaign. The more predictions you use to develop an average, the more accurate your number of predicted searches will be.
Using paid search reports has proven to be one of the most reliable forms of determining high-value terms to target for SEO. Unfortunately, not all clients will have the luxury of running full-exposure budgeted campaigns for a significant length of time to gather the amount of data needed, especially for waves of searches for products or services that ebb and flow with the seasons.
Another thing to consider is that after the discovery phase, some of the unidentified long tail terms may end up getting ranked, thus driving conversions. These rankings should rightly be considered a result of the SEO campaign, even though all terms were not identified in advance. Thus, padding should be added to the potential aggregate ROI in order to improve accuracy.

The next problem in predicting anticipated revenue is that it is hard to assume a CTR. As discussed last time, the possibility of additional listings for the same site within paid or local results, affects its actual position in the top ten, etc. skewing the click-through rate dramatically. Without established rankings and a track record of click-through percentages, there may be a large gap between predicted CTR and actual CTR. Simply taking an average CTR for the number one through ten results on the first page of the SERP may be the only solution for this part of the equation.
It may be wise to consider researching aggregate CTRs for clients that are maintaining rankings in the top ten. This would be possible if the paid search impression data for the particular term were available and compared to the referrals from organic listings for each of the same keywords. If we did this for a statistically valid sample, we could probably come close to predicting CTR based on actual position within the top ten. Of course, we can probably pay for this kind of data as well.

Some conversions are more valuable than others. In the case of an eCommerce site, should a conversion that yields a $100 sale be considered more valuable than a conversion yielding a $10 sale? The obvious answer to this question is "yes." This brings us back to the choice of predicting ROI on a per-keyword-phrase level versus an aggregate prediction, which would force assumptions of how many $100 conversions were achieved versus $10 conversions. We could base this on an average sale, but may end up short-selling ourselves.
If a site's conversion event is a signup for a newsletter or an insurance quote, the site owner needs to assign a value to each visit. Again, this is difficult, as some searches are more likely to yield conversions than others. Using an insurance lead as the example, the same search for "health insurance Philadelphia" could yield a family of four buying the best available individual plan, or a single person buying a low-cost health plan.
Once again, an arbitrary estimate would be required for the average sale. The insurance example is even harder to predict due to the fact that some clients signing up may stay with the broker for years, continuously increasing the ROI from that one lead. Others may drop the plan and its commissions after just a few months. There are probably many other similar scenarios that could skew predictions based on a highly variant lifetime value of the client.
In the case of sites that do not have an online conversion mechanism, we can't overlook the branding factor in discussions of ROI derived from SEO. This is particularly important and would require a complete analysis on its own merit.

On a positive note, we are able to identify and research Web site competitors, enabling us to estimate the degree of difficulty in attaining top ten rankings. The problem is that it takes at least three or four hours of solid research to accurately predict how difficult it may be to eclipse the sites in the top ten. It can be done, but would this be justified as a discovery cost?

The idea of an "assist" exists, where someone may search a more general term and find it organically, early in the buying cycle, and then end up searching a branded term and finding a paid listing, converting on that. This is similar to the leaky bucket theory discussed last time. Should half or more of the credit be given to the organic result that the visitor first found, or even other results found within subsequent searches -- all of which arguably reinforced the brand?
This leads nicely to the question of "latent conversions." What happens if we SEO a site and the client ends the relationship after a year, subsequently gaining considerable rankings in months 13-24 and beyond, and the site is driving previously unrealized conversions as a result of the SEO work? This is why many top SEO consultants are moving aggressively toward a pay-per-performance clause within contracts.
Incentive clauses would really be the easiest solution to the problem of predicting ROI, especially if the deal hangs on the client wanting such an estimate. If the client and agency are willing, the frontloading of costs could be minimized to reflect actual setup work completed, and ongoing work could be paid for - after a certain time frame - by conversion-driven incentives. The most likely scenario for moving toward this model would require at least a two-year commitment and verbiage in the contract calling for a buy-out.
To recap, the major problems with predicting ROI for SEO include the uncertainty of most data sets and the inability to determine the actual ROI over the life of the Web site. Following is a list variables that should be considered in order to predict ROI.

We started with the following formula:
ROI = (Anticipated revenue from SEO efforts) - (Proposed cost of SEO project)
Breaking this down further, we have:
(Anticipated revenue from SEO efforts) = Conversions derived from Organic search visits
The unknown and known variables that can help solve the formula are:
Unknown:

• Total number of keyword phrases
• Possible searches for each keyword phrase
• Ranking for each keyword phrase
• Average CTR for each top ten position
• Traffic for each keyword phrase
• Assigned average value or arbitrary absolute value of each visit

Known:

• Previous site performance, if available
• Level of competition (if time is dedicated to this research)
• Level of paid keyword competition, which may indicate future efforts to SEO

Obviously, there is a lot of research that goes into predicting ROI of future SEO campaigns. Would this type of cost ever be justified prior to actual contracted work?
At least:
(Proposed cost of SEO project) = Known (unless performance incentives are used)
- Why Aren’t More Companies Using SEO?
Selling SEO is a bad business model, since any business must have strong fundamentals. Businesses should be able to define finite parameters that affect its revenue, expenditure and therefore profit. And a considerable amount of control is expected of these businesses on these parameters.
SEO is a field where parameters affecting the business model are more dynamic. Search Engine Optimization services offered by an agency to its clients has absolutely no control over Search Engine Algorithms, which ranks web pages in organic listings. Neither has it any full/part knowledge about its working.
Despite all this agencies across the world offer Search Engine Optimization services promising its clients higher ranking in Google search results, fully aware of the fact that Google itself cautions users on choosing SO services.

SEO Agency India

SEO Agencies must act like any other Ad agency or a PR agency, they promise to work for your promote your brand online but do not take fully responsible for the result of the action/promotion.
Similarly SEO agency must follow the below important issues:
1) Make a review of the website initially and send it to the client.
2) Educate your clients about Search Engine Guidelines & process of SEO. They should be repetitive, if need to be emphasize on maintaining search engine friendly site.
3) Suggest/Work more on making the client content copies more appealing to the user.
4) Overlook every change made on the site to ensure high search engine crawl ability.
5) Evaluate the site on all commonly believed ranking factors
6) Any change you suggest on the site, educate the client first on why you are suggesting it.
7) Be transparent about your past clients, projects and method of working, such as explaining this activity would have high probability of generating this result.
Do not perform Link exchanges, use more Link baiting methods.
9) Communication is the key, keep informed about latest developments in your work.
10) Avoid spamming of all forms, Black Hat SEO and other unacceptable methods to boost rankings.
11) Avoid using software that queries Google, other search engines.
12) R&D and innovation is must need for every SEO company. They should have resources/manpower who constantly works on new methods & ways of promotion.
13) There are some SEO companies who have converted their SEO division into an assembly line production unit, every new SEO project is taken through same set of standard processes without any customization or knowledge input. All this in the name of ISO standardization. This is due to sheer lack of knowledge of Industry dynamics (environment). You must understand one size does not fit all.

SEO Client India
Every Company having a website & can convert its online visitors into sales/revenue must think about SEO services at some point or the other. Organic traffic is highly targeted and gives higher ROI than any other online source of traffic. More over Organic traffic adds branding value to the company, for ranking top for branded terms, in addition to generating traffic.
Companies when choosing a SEO service provider must remember following things:
A) SEO results cannot be achieved overnight. It requires patience and hard work.
B) SEO can be done both in-house and outsourced to an agency.
C) In-house SEO will give you flexibility, Accountability and a person who understands your business and your company.
D) SEO agency may have the expertise but lack insight into your business, or may be unaware of your company processes. Also if you do not want your outsourced partner to make direct changes to your website, then co-ordination between your Tech departments is a key issue.

E) Get details of past work, previous clients.
F) Know about their mode of work or standard processes. Get to know if they use any SEO software
G) This is a single test for choosing SEO agency; find out how much of R&D, knowledge work, innovation or Human involvement is present in forming SEO strategies for your project.
H) Make sure they do not perform any spammy activities to artificially boost your rankings.
I) They should be ready to educate you, whenever & whatever necessary about SEO and processes.
J) Be Open to new suggestions/ideas which your SEO consultant may suggest. For example Flashy design, extensive facelift for the site may not convert into equivalent sales/revenue for the business. It may not make business sense to have a highly decorative website. Ordinary simple websites with great content can do a much better job of generating traffic, revenue, meeting ROI & brand value.
- Web Site Elements Impacting Search Compatibility
Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site's search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time, and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible.

You might consider preparing something similar for your own site or clients.


Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your clients exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questions answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)

2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?â€&index.html157; symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is search engine friendly).

4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?

6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7) What is the current link popularity of the site?

8) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

9) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to a site admin for integration?

10) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

11) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

12) What are the site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

13) What are the site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

14) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find the site in the search engines? (More about this next lesson).

15) Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

16) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

17) Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

18) How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s rankings in the search engines?

19) Do I or my client have the ability and resources in place to respond to increased traffic/business as a result of the campaign?

20) What are my/my client’s expectations for the optimization campaign? Are they realistic?


Answers to the first 10 questions above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and to be able to include your target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questions are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization campaign. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.
A Website Compatibility  Report is a detailed overview and analysis of your website's performance in the search engines and your website's overall compatibility with the search engines algorithms.
The review looks at the following elements of your site and their impact with search engines:

- The TITLE Element
Search engines read page title tags and meta descriptions first to determine what a web page is all about. Your web page is not likely to be ever highly ranked unless keywords are contained in title tags. The title tag is the linking anchor to your web page in the search results. Therefore it must be compelling enough to entice click through. Limit the tag to about 80 to 100 characters and include an exact match to your primary targeted search phrase. Use trailing keywords to widen the potential of ranking opportunity for other “stemmed” phrases.

• The earlier keywords appear, the better.
• Including your company name consumes valuable space. If you must use it for branding, place it at the end of the title.
• Create a unique title tag for every web page to cover a wider-range of keyword coverage.
• The engines are not case-sensitive. Consider using both singular and plural word forms and synonyms…(car) auto, etcetera.

- The META Description Tag
The same basic principles that apply to the Title Tag, also apply to the meta description. Make it compelling, integrate your targeted keywords and limit its length to about 25-30 words. Some engines will use the meta description in the search results to describe your web page while other engines will “snippet” portions of page text, or both.
You can often “force” an engine to display your meta description with this approach… Include your primary keyword phrase within a continuous sentence. This gives you the potential of delivering a more compelling enticement to the surfer versus page snippets that sometimes form unintelligible “gibberish” as a description.
- The META Keywords Tag
Meta keywords provide miniscule value to ranking potential. However, always include important keywords in the tag. Separate keywords with commas and include multiple keyword phrases. Avoid excessively repeating keywords. Do not use keywords that are not related to your topic.
Value of Theming

There is evidence that some search engines reward topic-theming across on entire website with extra scoring value. The subject of what constitutes and creating theming value is complex. However, here is a basic approach to help gain potential…identify your three or four most valuable keywords and try and incorporate them into the important locations previously discussed across all web pages.

- The Alt IMG Attribute

The use of Alt Img attributes is important from a usability perspective, more so than any other reason. To ensure vision-impaired visitors (or those browsing with images turned off) can understand what your images represent, they should have alt text associated with them. This is not vital for design-related images, such as borders or spacers, but more so for product images, graphical headings and such. Now, there was a time when the use of Alt attributes contributed to a site's search relevancy. But thanks to abuse by webmasters over the years, the significance of the Atl attribute contribution to the overall ranking algorithm has reduced dramatically and it is also one of the areas search engines look at carefully for evidence of spam.

So what does that mean for persons optimizing their sites? It means you should still use Alt attributes but approach them from a usability perspective and forget any assumed search engine value. For example, if you sell shoes and you have 3 images of different shoes on a page, you should use simple Alt text to describe each in a way that a vision-impaired person could understand: "alt=blue suede shoes", "alt=black leather loafers", "alt=white strappy sandles". The wrong way to approach the same situation would be: "alt=shoes, shoes shoes", "alt=cheap cheap shoes", "alt=best shoes in the world". The first example is descriptive and clear and could also contribute to a page's relevancy for related keyword searches. The latter is non-descriptive, keyword-stuffed and self-promotional. It would be much more likely to trip spam filters.

- Text Links
There are webmasters out there who believe that good design, usability, and SEO can't co-exist in the same site; that effective SEO will ruin usability or design elements. While there are plenty of examples that seem to prove this point, it doesn't have to be that way.
Ask for advice on building a search-friendly website, and one of the tips you will often recieve is to use text links throughout your site. Text links are read by search engine spiders and render the same regardless of the type of browser being used. They are accessible by screen readers and can be easily identified as links using CSS rollover properties. It's great advice and you can't go wrong using text links.
However, sometimes the most relevant phrase for a page is just too long to use in your primary navigation without looking awkward or simply including too much information for the typical site user. That's when image links may be a better choice.

Image Links VS Text Links for SEO
Text that makes up a link is referred to as anchor text and it can be a powerful tool for search engine optimization. The text in the link tells the search engine what that page is about, and it is so powerful that pages can rank well for terms found only in links to the page and not on the page itself. (Type "miserable failure" into a Google search for an example.)
Customized text links are highly prized for their ability to improve rankings for specific search terms and it makes sense to use them on your internal pages, since those pages "count" when the engines look at links and relevance.
Image links are followed and counted as well, and the text in the alt attribute for the image serves the same function as anchor text. General theory holds that alt text isn't as "powerful" as link text, and for good reason. Webmasters who try to "game the system" stuff zillions of phrases into their image alts in an attempt to rank better for those terms. Because it isn't an element that is likely to be seen by users (unless they hover over an image), it can be more easily abused. In general, search engines prefer to give more weight to elements that users can see.
While it's difficult to prove that alt text on image links is "less important" than text links, it does seem to make sense that text links have a little more "weight" than image links.
- Keyword-Rich Body Text
A well-optimized title and a good heading won't do much, unless the page also contains some keyword-rich body text. Preferably, your document should contain several occurrences of the keyword.

As many search engines place more weight to words found at the top of the page, so it's also very important that your keyword appears there. Again, you'll also need to make your writing seem natural. Nobody wants to read a page that is just one big list of keywords.
Using the keyword in bold, italics, underlined or in outgoing link text can also provide a minor boost. However, because it influences the readability of the document, be careful with this one as well.

Just like with the title and heading, keeping long keyword phrases together in your body text is a must. However, if you can't do so, splitting the phrase up is better than not using it at all.
What about the number of keywords in body text? How often should you repeat it? If you're aiming at a 2-word keyphrase, start at somewhere around 1-3 instances per 100 words of text. Note that the 100-word figure includes all very commonly used words (I, he, what and so on).