misstserver.misst.muskingum.edumisstserver.misst.muskingum.edu/.../tinker_infr608_final…  · Web viewWebsite rank can affect your revenue, your brand ... for costs associated with

Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing

Dave Tinker, CFRE

Professor Reichard

Muskingum University INFR 608

September 20, 2009

With a grant from National City Bank in 2007, ACHIEVA redesigned and relaunched its

website. This has resulted in growth in the number of people using the site, the information

shared, and number of people who have access our information. However we are not reaching

the largest audience possible. This underutilization is the same as leaving money on the table

and is limiting the number of people we serve. The key reason for this is that ACHIEVA does not

currently employ many SEO techniques. We also do not employ any SEM techniques. These

simple and cost-effective techniques can maximize the number of people who know about us,

learn about our services and purchase our products. It also can enhance the number of people

with disabilities and families that will select us as their preferred provider.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are two equally

important yet different methods to promote your website, thus promoting your cause or

product. SEO is part of SEM. Website rank can affect your revenue, your brand strength, and

the community’s sense of reverence for your organization. When people want to find

information about a health condition or a human service provider, they first turn to the

internet. This is especially true of younger parents with children first being diagnosed with a

developmental delay or disability.

These parents and family members first turn to a search engine to find websites

containing the information they seek. There are three search engines that account for more

than 96% of all searches (Garner). Companies and nonprofit organizations focus on these three

search sites, Google, Yahoo, Bing, with the occasional niche search engine that may fit within

their field. Additionally, people also take into account the next two largest search engines,

2 | P a g e

Ask.com and AOL. However, AOL uses Google to boost its search results. This means that

Google’s results are combined with AOL’s and thus will have a very similar end result.

SEO is the art of enhancing your website so that it appears “above the scroll” in search

engine results. SEM is a form of marketing using search engine result pages to display

advertisements. The main difference between the two is SEO doesn’t necessarily involve

money to get your website at the top of search results while SEM does. The purpose of this

document is to introduce some basic concepts of SEO and SEM, to look at how ACHIEVA

currently fits into search results, and how to enhance our presence in search engines.

Search engines have been around since Archie was launched in 1990 (Search Engine

History). Since then, search engines have become some of the largest key multi-national

corporate entities in the world. Search engines work to collect and share information. There

are mainly three parts to a search engine. The first part is a spider. Some search engines, such

as Bing, Google, and Ask run programs, called robots or spiders, looking for all of the pages on

the internet. The second part is the index. As search engines index pages, they are stored so

that the information they contain can be brought up quickly. The third part is search relevancy

and interface. This is where a search engine’s website accepts a query and that information is

quickly analyzed so that it can produce search results from its index. New sites like Facebook

and Twitter have pushed the envelope on real time search. Information can be found through

Twitter and Facebook’s search tools as soon as the information is posted to an account.

There are at least one trillion web pages currently indexed (Google). Other search

engines, such as DMOZ and Mahalo, use a large database that individuals enter the information

3 | P a g e

and call themselves human powered search. Because of this they are smaller than search

engines that use robots. These search engines are used by other search engines, such as

Google, to bolster their indexes (DMOZ).

SEO

There are several key categories that comprise SEO. These include meta-tags, website

copy or content, sitemaps, back links, and keywords strength. I will briefly describe each here.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are codes in the website program language that provide information to your

web browser, search engines, and information for people who view websites with accessible

technology, such as a Braille screen reader. These tags can tell you the title of a page, some

keywords you will find on a page, who designed the page, how often a robot used by search

engines should visit the site. Conversely, you can tell a search browser robot to not visit a site.

Sitemaps

Search engine robots index a webpage most easily by reviewing a sitemap page. It is

common for web page designers to add a sitemap page to a web site for this very reason. The

site map page includes links to all of the pages you want a visitor, and in this case search

engines, to see. Because some navigation menus are written in code that is difficult for a robot

to decipher or view to find links, a site map allows a robot to retrieve information in one place.

When a person submits domain urls to search engines to add to their robot queue, they

sometimes only add the top level domain, e.g. www.name.com, instead of

4 | P a g e

www.name.com/second.html. However, search engines, such as Ask.com, will only index a

page if you submit the site map page. A sitemap url might look like

www.name.com/siteindex.xml

Keywords and Copy

As search engines index pages, they sometimes read all of the text on the page. They

remember all of the words. When a person does a search query, the keywords on your page

will affect whether or not your page will be brought up and your rank on the search results. If

someone is using the following search “Pittsburgh disability” and your site had the terms

Pittsburgh and disability on them, it would help your page have a higher score on the search

engines algorithm than a page that only had one of the terms.

It is important to study the words people use to find your site. These are not always the

words or terms you use within your organization or company. Knowing the keywords that

people use to find your site will influence what words you build into your meta tags and your

web pages.

Back Links

Another technique that people try to use to build their rank in search engines are the

number of websites that link to their own. Back links are sometimes thought to be a measure

of the importance of the page being link to by another site (Weitzel). Because of this, it is

important for other websites to link to your own to build your ranking, and the chance that a

5 | P a g e

search engine robot will find your links. This can include news sites, blogs, and social media

tools such as Twitter that mention your web site.

Black Hat Techniques

Sometimes people try to game the search engine page-ranking system. Because of the

potential financial impact for corporate websites, some webmasters have resorted to

underhanded techniques to try to move their website up the search list. Once such technique,

which has since fallen out of favor, is writing copy and coding it so it is the same color as the

background. For example you would write an extra paragraph at the bottom of a page, but you

would code it white to match a white background. A person viewing the website would not see

this copy but a search engine robot would. ACHIEVA currently does this, but not with malicious

intent, on its homepage and should stop. Because of people doing this, and other “black hat”

techniques, search engine companies change their algorithms to punish these people.

SEM

Like SEO, there are a few key categories that make up SEM. This includes Pay-Per-Click

(PPC), Banner ads, and sponsored search results. Depending on your budget and the websites

you wish to market on, SEM can ensure that your link shows up on a search, even if it is

identified as a paid placement or advertisement. To me it is more pure marketing that includes

search engine optimizing.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is a marketing method where you buy ad space on a website but only pay for the ad

6 | P a g e

if someone clicks on your advertisement. This includes banner ads and sponsored search

results, which I discuss next. Sites like Google allow you to bid on keywords, in similar fashion

to an auction, so that your ad for a product comes up when someone uses a search term that

you’ve identified. Many companies will buy paid-per-click advertising to make sure that when

someone does a search for a competitor their ad comes up. An example of this would be an ad

for Ford comes up when someone searches for a Toyota.

Banner Ads

Some search engines are moving to bigger ad placements. Ads, such as banner ads, are

another type of instance where you can make sure your company’s link or information comes

up when someone performs a search. Like pay-per-click, many companies will buy advertising

to promote their goods when someone searches for a competitor.

Sponsored Search Results

Sponsored search results are similar to banner ads except the links are the

advertisement. Google, Bing, and others will place sponsored search results at the top of a

results page. The links look very similar to the organic search results; however they are just

dissimilar enough to make them look slightly different.

ACHIEVA’s Web Site Statistics

ACHIEVA’s web pages hits have grown from 1.2 million in 2006 to 1.7 million in 2009

representing a 40% growth. This figure includes the number of times a web page has been

7 | P a g e

visited, the images viewed on the page and any other file like a document or video that is

viewed. Appendix A is a chart indicating this growth.

The number of unique visitors has grown. However, when we redesigned the web site

2007, we changed the statistical analysis package for our website from Webtrends to awstats.

This change is obvious in the number of unique visitors recorded as seen in the chart in

Appendix B. We dropped from approximately 110,000 unique visitors in 2006 to more than

32,000 visitors in 2007. This does not indicate a true drop in number of people visiting the site.

This drop shows the difference in ways in which a unique visitor is recorded when using two

analysis software packages. Since 2007, the unique visitors have grown by nearly double to

60,000 unique visitors.

Search Engines and Terms People Use to Find ACHIEVA

The search engines people use to search for ACHIEVA mirrors the search engines people

use for all searches on the internet. Appendix C shows that people searching for ACHIEVA use

Google and Yahoo two-tenths of one percent more often than the average web user. They use

Bing almost half as much than the average web user. People searching for ACHIEVA use

Ask.com 80% less often than the average web user. At 1.9%, they use AOL six times more than

the average user. However, at 1.9%, it is a very small fraction of the overall searches.

The keywords and phrases people used to find ACHIEVA was surprising. People used the

term ACHIEVA to find us more than 10,500 times. The second, fifth and ninth most used search

terms were geographic in nature, with ACHIEVA Pittsburgh at 2,611 searches, ACHIEVA

Pittsburgh PA at 357 searches and ACHIEVA Pa at 158 searches, respectively. The mistyped

8 | P a g e

ACHEIVA was the third most search phrase at 590 times. The ACHIEVA Family Trust was the

fourth most searched term with 410 searches. Similarly, the term Sample Special Need Trust

was used 322 times. ACHIEVA’s actual url is the sixth and eighth most searched term with

ACHIEVA.INFO at 322 searches and www.achieva.info at 255 searches. The ninth most

searched term is Camp ACHIEVA with 209 searches. All other searches account for 15,687 but

none of them are more than 158 searches.

These results didn’t match the meta tags we had placed on ACHIEVA’s main page. The

meta tags we used for ACHIEVA home page included the terms autism, early intervention,

disability, mental retardation and vocational, because we believed these would be terms we

want people to use to find us. Either people don’t use these terms or don’t find us when they

do use these terms. Therefore, I searched the top five search engines for 10 key phrases to see

how we showed up in the results. Appendix E consists of charts of my results. I searched for

the follow ten phrases:

ACHIEVA

ACHEIVA

Autism Pittsburgh

Disability Pittsburgh

Early Intervention

Early Intervention Pittsburgh

Mental Retardation Pittsburgh

Special Needs Trusts

Vocational Supports

9 | P a g e

On the plus side, searching for the term ACHIEVA and ACHEIVA, I found that we were

always the first website to come up. However the other key phrases didn’t result in ACHIEVA

coming up first, or at all. However our competitors did. Of note, Autism Pittsburgh resulted in

no ACHIEVA listings in the top ten, but our competitors came up in an average of 60% of the

links for each search engine, including the top result in each one. We also didn’t come up at all

in the top ten when searching for mental retardation Pittsburgh. Our competitors came up in

the top ten an average of more than 4 times in each search result. We came up first only once

for Early Intervention Pittsburgh. Our competitors came up an average of four times in each

search engine including being first in three of the other four search engines. Simply put, if our

website is not coming up in search results, then people can’t click to our site. According to April

Weitzel, a local search engine optimization consultant, people will click on a search result from

the first page of result more than 60% of the time without scrolling down to view more results.

Also, people will click on a link on the first three pages of the search results more than 90% of

the time.

Return on Investment

The return on investment (ROI) for costs associated with SEO and SEM can be regained

quickly by just a few referrals. For example, each Early Intervention child’s family that chooses

us means thousands of dollars of revenue. It won’t take many children gained through SEO and

SEM techniques before we have realized a positive outcome. Since we strive to serve these

children not just through their few years in Early Intervention, but through their entire lives,

when possible, this ROI could mean tens of thousands of dollars or more of additional revenue.

10 | P a g e

SEO and SEM also have implications for increased sales through our vocational

programs. Increased contracts for pallets, landscaping, mail services, light assembly and

cleaning and janitorial work will increase the vocational opportunities for people with

disabilities and increase revenues for these programs. The ability to create more work for

people with disabilities will allow us to continue our mission of providing programs and services

for people with disabilities.

Implications for ACHIEVA

What does the analysis of these results of ACHIEVA’s web presence mean? It means that

ACHIEVA is not reaching the intended audience as we had hoped. Clearly we are not coming up

in all of the search engine results that we anticipated. In fact our competitors are coming up

first. They are doing so by utilizing SEO and SEM. To get ahead of our competitors we need to

implement a SEO and SEM plan of our own. This implementation will allow us to fulfill our

mission to serve more people with disabilities and their families and caregivers throughout

their lifetime. Additionally, it will also increase our program revenues.

Plan of Action

First, the results of this analysis need to be reviewed thoroughly. The keywords we

want to be known by, whether the ones we have as meta tags or the ones people use to find

us, need to be weeded down to a manageable number per page. The main home page for

ACHIEVA should not try to attract all of the key word search results. Subpages of our website

can and should be used to focus on specific key words and phrases. Meta tags including the

title, keywords, and description should be adjusted on each page so that they are different.

11 | P a g e

Currently they are all the same. Thus, search engines only see the same content for our pages.

The search engines don’t examine the various terms our pages truly hold. The copy on pages

can be adapted to match the keywords we wish to focus on for each page.

The domains www.acheiva.info and www.acheiva.org should be purchased since it is a

top key search term and a frequent mistyping of our name. By redirecting them to our main

page we will increase the number of people visiting our page. Additionally, the site map for

ACHIEVA’s web site needs to be updated and submitted to the major search engines.

ACHIEVA needs to identify ways to get back links. These back links will enhance the

search results for ACHIEVA because more people will be referring to us. This can include asking

trustees, volunteers and families we serve to link to ACHIEVA’s web pages from their company

pages and social media sites. Additionally, we should ask our partners, including other Arc

chapters, local agencies, and vendors to link back to us as well. This could generate several

hundred back links in short time. These will enhance our search rankings.

Next, ACHIEVA needs to purchase and use SEO and SEM software tools. SEOMoz’s tools

and SEOTools by SEOBook.com are relatively inexpensive at $125-$150 per month. They

automate things that can be done manually, thus reducing time spent doing SEO and SEM

analysis. They will help us monitor our rankings and our competitors’ rankings, allow us to see

how search engines see our site, and identify key words or phrases we should use based on the

copy on each page, in addition to many other functions.

A budget for SEM should be created. No matter how much time and resources we

expend on SEO, it doesn’t guarantee that we will always come up on the top of a search result.

12 | P a g e

This is especially true as search engines continue to enhance their search algorithms to provide

more accurate results for their customers. However, search engines such as Google and Yahoo

allow you to purchase text link ads or banner ads that will come up every time someone uses a

search term we specify such as Early Intervention Pittsburgh. We can also place an ad for

ACHIEVA’s web site on the search results when someone searches for our competitors. While

the price for different search terms varies widely, based on the demand for that term, we can

use tools on each search engine to see how much a sponsored link will cost for any given

keyword or phrase.

Once the aforementioned planning has been done, we need to implement the SEO

changes and purchase SEM advertising. Then we can monitor the results. We should see an

increase in number of people visiting our site and searching more of our web pages. We should

see an increase in referrals and an increase in offline inquiries for help.

Conclusion

ACHIEVA is not just a local leader but a national leader in the disability field. The search

results for our myriad programs and services should reflect this. SEO and SEM are both

important to increasing an organization’s ability to come up first when someone does a search.

Through paying attention to meta tags, sitemaps, keywords and copy, and back links, one can

increase the chances of a top search ranking. Because the search engines constantly change

their algorithms to increase quality of results, increase speed of results, and to avoid websites

that try to game the system through underhanded, or “black hat” techniques, it is difficult to

ensure that a page will always be the top result. SEM is a method that ensures your ad or link

13 | P a g e

appears at the top of a search result. While different, both can produce the desired outcome,

i.e. being at the top. Employing an SEO and SEM plan as part of our overall agency marketing

plan will pay for itself by allowing us to see an increase in web visitors, brand awareness, and

number of people who purchase or otherwise use our programs and services.

14 | P a g e

Appendix A

Number of hits on ACHIEVA’s web pages

2005 2006* 2007 2008 20090

400000

800000

1200000

1600000

2000000

ACHIEVA's Web Page Hits

Hits

Source awstats 9/09

15 | P a g e

Appendix B

Number of Unique Visitors to www.achieva.info

2005 2006* 2007 2008 20090

20000400006000080000

100000120000

Visits

Visits

Source awstats 9/09

16 | P a g e

Appendix C

Search Engine People Used to Find ACHIEVA

Versus Search Engines People Use for All Web Searches

Google Yahoo Bing (MSNLive)Ask.com AOL.com0

1020304050607080

Perc

enta

ge

Source Hitwise 8/09 and awstats 9/09

17 | P a g e

Appendix D

Top Key Phrases People Use to Search for ACHIEVA Online

(figures from partial year extrapolated for 12 month period)

Top Key Phrases Searched 2009 projected searches

ACHIEVA 10,635

ACHIEVA Pittsburgh 2,611

ACHEIVA (typo) 590

ACHIEVA Family Trust 410

ACHIEVA Pittsburgh pa 357

ACHIEVA.INFO 322

Sample Special Needs Trust 322

www.achieva.info 255

Camp ACHIEVA 209

ACHIEVA Pa 158

Other 15,687

Source awstats 9/09

18 | P a g e

Appendix E

Manual Keyword Search in Top 5 Search Engines in August 2009

Google

Keyword Term/Phrase ACHIEVA CompetitorACHIEVA 1, 2 0ACHEIVA (typo) 1 0

Autism Pittsburgh 01, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7,

8Disability Pittsburgh 0 0Early Intervention 0 0Early Intervention Pittsburgh 2 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9Mental Retardation Pittsburgh 0 1, 2, 3, 5, 7Special Needs Trusts 0 0Vocational Supports 8,9 0

Yahoo

Keyword Term/Phrase ACHIEVA CompetitorACHIEVA 1, 2 0ACHEIVA (typo) 1, 2 0

Autism Pittsburgh 01, 2, 3, 5, 6,

7Disability Pittsburgh 0 0Early Intervention 0 0Early Intervention Pittsburgh 5, 6 3, 7, 10Mental Retardation Pittsburgh 0 1, 2, 6, 8, 10Special Needs Trusts 0 0Vocational Supports 3, 4 0

19 | P a g e

Bing

Keyword Term/Phrase ACHIEVA CompetitorACHIEVA 1, 5 0ACHEIVA (typo) 1 0

Autism Pittsburgh 01, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9,

10Disability Pittsburgh 0 0Early Intervention 0 0Early Intervention Pittsburgh 1, 8 3, 4, 5, 6Mental Retardation Pittsburgh 0 3, 4Special Needs Trusts 0 0Vocational Supports 4 0

Ask.com

Keyword Term/Phrase ACHIEVA CompetitorACHIEVA 1, 9 0ACHEIVA (typo) 0 0Autism Pittsburgh 0 1, 2, 3, 4, 9Disability Pittsburgh 0 0Early Intervention 0 0Early Intervention Pittsburgh 3 1, 2, 4

Mental Retardation Pittsburgh 01, 2, 3, 6, 7,

8Special Needs Trusts 0 0Vocational Supports 0 0

AOL

Keyword Term/Phrase ACHIEVA CompetitorACHIEVA 1, 2 0ACHEIVA (typo) 0 0

Autism Pittsburgh 01, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9,

10Disability Pittsburgh 0 0Early Intervention 0 0Early Intervention Pittsburgh 2 1, 3, 5, 7, 10Mental Retardation Pittsburgh 0 1, 2, 3, 6, 8 Special Needs Trusts 0 0Vocational Supports 7 0

20 | P a g e

References

120 Billion Web Pages Indexed By Cuil (Retrieved 8/15/09)

http://perl.sys-con.com/node/620174

Awstats ACHIEVA web site statistics (Retrieved 9/1/09). http://www.achieva.info

DMOZ Open Directory Project (Retrieved 8/15/09)

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/Open_Directory_Project/

Sites_Using_ODP_Data/G/

Garner, By the Numbers, Search Pre and Post Bing. (Retrieved 8/15/09)

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=110281

Google Reaches 1 Trillion Indexed Pages. (Retrieved 8/15/09)

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Google-Reached-1-Trillion-Indexed-Pages-90864.shtml

Hitwise, (Retrieved 8/31/09). http://www.hitwise.com

Search Engine History (Retrieved 8/15/09). http://www.searchenginehistory.com/

SE0 April, April Weitzel, SEO Consultant. (Retrieved 9/1/09). http://www.seoapril.com

Vogelstein, F. Why Is Obama's Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google? (Retrieved

8/15/09) http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-08/mf_googlopoly?currentPage=all

Wikipedia Search Engine Marketing (Retrieved 8/15/09)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing

21 | P a g e