Website design and searchability

[phanio]

My company has been working on creating a couple of it’s own niche search engines – one that is focused on venture capital and angel capital resources and one that is focused on all types of capital needs from business products and services to personal consumer financial needs

Once we debugged the code enough based on our test pages and sites, we started to index real data. And, given the garbage we get from some of these sites, it just amazes me how firms like Google and Bing are able to provide the results they do. Not from the fact that there is so much data to mine and index but the fact that very few people create websites that are searchable.

Even some of the top name companies that we are indexing their websites are crap. It almost seems that they create these sites as after thoughts and not the true marketing avenues they can be. Many do not have any meta data outlining who the company is and what they do. Some don’t even have titles. Some sites are pure flash and JavaScript. We even came across a few sites (the names of which would really make you wonder) who’s meta tags were filled with information pointing back to the company hired to design the site for them and not to the company itself. Hope they did not pay very much for that.

It is truly amazing what Google and the likes can do given all the crap that is out there on the web. But, it also makes you think about how relevant their results can actually be given that many of the sites that should be returned to relevant search strings may never be found or adequately indexed based on their design and poor content.

Just as a side note, if you use your website as a primary marketing tool, make sure that your site is easily searchable – just think that if search engines want to search and rank your site and all they can find is garbage, all they will be able to return is that same garbage.

No wonder Google and some of the others are putting out information on how sites should be designed – if some webmasters could just follow some very simple guidelines, the web would be a much better place – meaning getting better search results and saving tons of time for the users.

[vangogh]

Yep. I've always been impressed that any search engine delivers results that are even reasonably close to what I'm looking for.

By the way I'm obviously in agreement with everything you're saying and happy to have you say it since it's a perfect endorsement for my business. :)

One last thing. I've never built a search engine myself, but I've come across people who have and all will tell you it's one of the best ways to learn about seo. Once you start seeing it from the perspective of search engines you gain a lot of insight about how to develop your site.

[billbenson]

Don't know if it's relevant here, but on my ecommerce site, I try to put misspellings or discriminative terms to enhance the site search. Say someone is looking for a XXL life vest. They probably start out on google searching for life vests. Come to a site and want to see if you carry XXL. Some people may search for e, some 2X. I put in the descriptions XXL (2X). Some of my products are misspelled so often that the misspelled term is more common than the correct spelling. I do everything I can to get all common spellings into a description. In some cases it makes reading the sentence a little clumbsy, but I want to be sure someone searching for product x finds the product. I don't think I do it enough to qualify for keyword spamming, but it is a risk I suppose?

I guess the point is, many sites are written so people on the site can't even easily use the search function for finding the product they want. If they don't do that how is google supposed to index the page properly?

[Harold Mansfield]

Large Companies don't care about SEO. They have the advertising budget that makes SEO seem like poor mans marketing.
They are going to spend hundreds of millions hitting you in your living room, during your favorite sports program, and prime time television.

That (Mass Media Advertising and Marketing) is always going to..at least for now..trump any search and meta information in the header for a website.

SEO is not what they are relying on for traffic. Their ad campaigns are, and when the ad campaign is running, they will still have bloggers blogging about them, other sites linking to them, plus their own network of companies, paid reviews, and news outlets linking to them..and an SEO campaign can't compare to that kind of reach and leverage.

You ever look at a new movie site and see how many links it has coming in? After they throw the trailer on T.V. a few hundred times, every entertainment blogger, newspaper and trade publication starts talking about them, and linking back to them...so much so that in a few weeks they can pick up hundreds of thousands of inbound links from all over the world.

T.V. is their SEO.

[Business Attorney]

eborg more or less stole my thunder, but I'd like to add a little. I look at the web pages for big law firms and accounting firms and they have very little SEO. Their pages are almost all named something like "index.asp?nid=9654". Why? Because their target market is not the person trying to find an attorney or an accountant using a search engine. In fact, they are not geared to cope on a daily basis with calls coming in from the internet and they probably wouldn't want 99.999% of the business that they might be able to get from those calls.

The result is that if you search for an attorney or accountant on Google, you will almost always see small firms or sole practitioners atop the results. But I would argue that in most cases, for the person searching, the results are more relevant BECAUSE the big companies are not seeking to garner top rankings in the search results. Someone searching in Google for "Illinois mergers attorney" is likely to be an entrepreneur looking to sell his small or mid-sized business. When my site comes up #1 in the search results for "Illinois mergers attorney", the searcher will be better served than if the pages were filled with dozens of lawyers who primarily handle billion dollar deals.

[phanio]

I agree with some comments that SEO may not be top of mind for big companies or companies that dominate other marketing channels - but, if you are going to take the time to put up and host a website, why not do it correctly. What could be the harm?

[Harold Mansfield]

I agree with some comments that SEO may not be top of mind for big companies or companies that dominate other marketing channels - but, if you are going to take the time to put up and host a website, why not do it correctly. What could be the harm?

Because honestly, they don't need to, or care. They are going to get the SEO love anyway...and the companies that build these sites for them know it...most times it's just an arm of the ad or marketing company anyway.

All they need is the web property to function, TV is their marketing plan and in many cases adwords...not keywords.

When you have major ad dollars, SEO is small stuff.
David put it best:


Why? Because their target market is not the person trying to find an attorney or an accountant using a search engine. In fact, they are not geared to cope on a daily basis with calls coming in from the internet and they probably wouldn't want 99.999% of the business that they might be able to get from those calls.

Look at some of the biggest advertisers of the century..Coke, Pepsi ( Pizza Hut, KFC, Frito Lay) , Budweiser, Miller, and Mc Donalds. Do you really think they give a crap about incoming links ? Yet they have more than anyone on the web...because they have Major Mass Media Money.

They don't need to hope to be found, or worry about ranking for a keyword..they are household names. No one looks for McDonalds online by searching anything. They just type in "McDonalds"....when you have that.. Talking SEO is like talking ads in the free Neighborhood Guide.

[billbenson]

Ya, but take a manufacturer like HP. They want people to find what they are looking for. Be it a reseller looking for product information to put on their web site or the end user looking for product information to make a buying decision. Amazon doesn't need it, Coke doesn't need it, but a lot of big name companies do.

[Harold Mansfield]

Ya, but take a manufacturer like HP. They want people to find what they are looking for. Be it a reseller looking for product information to put on their web site or the end user looking for product information to make a buying decision. Amazon doesn't need it, Coke doesn't need it, but a lot of big name companies do.

True and HP is optimized. They also have a bunch of products, people may be more prone to search for the hardware first..if they aren't just going to HP directly.
I'm just saying...it stands to reason that if your company has main stream household recognition...people will find you no matter what because they will search for you directly...not by your industry or a general product name.

I would say that car companies probably enjoy the same luxury.

[vangogh]

Large Companies don't care about SEO. They have the advertising budget that makes SEO seem like poor mans marketing.

I disagree. I don't think the distinction is large companies. Many large companies do care a lot about SEO and have in-house SEO teams. The NY Times is a site that comes to mind. They practice a lot of seo and even push the envelope. A couple years back they started cloaking content so users had to pay and register, while they let search engines grab their content to be indexed and ranked.

BMW is another company that pushed the seo envelope. In fact they went so far as to get banned for a day. Google did let them back in the next day.

Large companies do have larger budgets and naturally use those budgets. Many large companies also practice seo.

In fact many of the changes Google has made over the years specifically favor big brands. Large companies didn't do seo as quick as smaller ones did, but many are practicing it not. Not all, but the distinction isn't about size.

[billbenson]

For years I have thought that corporate america has done a horrible job of web design. Corporate webmasters usually (I believe) report to some marketing manager. I don't believe web marketing is more than briefly touched on to get your MBA. The webmasters I have talked with in these types of companies have very little knowledge of web marketing.

The marketing departments frequently have an attitude of build it and they will come. They have no idea or budget for what they could do to their web site to generate revenue.

Obviously their are exceptions, but you don't have to look at to many web sites or talk to very many corporate executives to figure out this is very common.

[KristineS]

Large Companies don't care about SEO. They have the advertising budget that makes SEO seem like poor mans marketing.
They are going to spend hundreds of millions hitting you in your living room, during your favorite sports program, and prime time television.



I have to disagree with you as well, eborg. I worked for a major SEO firm for a while. We had clients of all shapes and sizes and some were very large companies that were quite well known and already had top of mind awareness. Some of those companies are very aware of SEO and are willing to spend a lot of money to achieve the placements they think they should achieve. The big budgets extend to SEO campaigns as well. The company for which I used to work has probably tripled in size in the last six years, so someone is forking over a lot of money and the small companies simply don't have that sort of dough.

[vangogh]

You could even argue that it's small businesses that need to change their thinking about seo more than large companies. Smaller organizations usually have less time to invest in learning seo or hiring a company that already knows how so instead they focus on tricks that are supposed to be easy and not time consuming.

I think the issue with larger companies is that they're slower to react to change. It's harder for a larger company to change strategy and tactics. They often take a wait and see approach before jumping in. SEO has been around long enough and shown to work often enough that the wait and see is over or coming to an end for many large companies.

[Harold Mansfield]

I have to disagree with you as well, eborg. I worked for a major SEO firm for a while. We had clients of all shapes and sizes and some were very large companies that were quite well known and already had top of mind awareness. Some of those companies are very aware of SEO and are willing to spend a lot of money to achieve the placements they think they should achieve. The big budgets extend to SEO campaigns as well. The company for which I used to work has probably tripled in size in the last six years, so someone is forking over a lot of money and the small companies simply don't have that sort of dough.

I guess that was a broad statement and probably depends on each individual company rather than just a blanket statement about all of the ones with big ad budgets.
There is also a big difference in what a household name is, compared to just a big company. I still stand by the notion that no one is going to search for "Fast Food Hamburger Restaurants", they will just type in "Mc Donald's", "Carl's Jr", "Jack In The Box" or what ever. Do those companies really need SEO to be found online?

On the other hand a company like Price Waterhouse is big, but not well known to the average person..they would probably spend time and money on SEO because people will search for their industry or specialty.

Update:
I actually searched for "Fast Food Hamburgers" and just plain "Hamburgers" and outside of local listings, the only Major Corp that came up in the first page of the results was Wendy's.

[Business Attorney]

It's interesting. It certainly differs from company to company and product to product. When I searched just now for "laundry detergent" on Google I got:

#2 tide.com (Tide)
#6 all-laundry.com (All)
#8 cheer.com (Cheer)
#10 ilovegain.com (Gain)

Tide, Cheer and Gain are all P&G brands while All is owned by Sun Products Corporation.

P&G is no slouch when it comes to marketing, of course. Although the brands' websites might naturally appear high in the rankings, I don't doubt that those search results had a little SEO magic thrown in for good measure.

[vangogh]

Things have changed in the last couple of years. Big companies took awhile, because they're big and they move slowly through all the corporate red tape, but they have caught on to seo being a good source of traffic.

It's certainly not all big companies, but the distinction of who is and isn't paying attention to seo isn't really about the size of the company any more.