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Search Engine Optimization: The Big Question For 2002
Many magazine publishers decry their web site’s lack of positioning on search engines as a major road-block to the site’s success. In most cases, it’s the site itself that stands in the way of good search engine placement, and in all but a few instances, the problem is largely irrelevant.
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While you can do things to improve the way your web site shows up in search engine results, the real challenge for today’s publishers is to figure out if search engine placement is really that important to the site’s overall mission.
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Here’s why:
Most readers visit a publisher’s web site because they were driven there by the magazine’s brand. Readers who discover the site from a search engine are of little value until they become qualified (or registered) subscribers, and too few sites are really designed to turn new visitors into qualified readers and buyers.
Search engine placement has some value for general interest consumer magazines and their advertisers, but for most niche, b-2-b and specialty publishers, search engine placement is only valuable in terms of increasing awareness of the publication and gaining new readers. And most publishers don’t get hot and bothered trying to increase circulation.
The reason publishers get up-tight about search engines is not because of reader or user traffic, but because all too often, they’ve had an advertiser shove search results in their faces showing a competing publication’s site comes up more prominently – or more frequently.
This is a valid concern and taking an educational approach with an advertiser may be your best bet. Hiring companies and consultants to come in and "optimize" your sites for search engine placement may not be the magic answer and perhaps wasted dollars. And while there are many things you can do to make your site more accessible to search engines, there is no quick science to getting priority listings.
While you can do things to improve the way your web site shows up in search engine results, the real challenge for today’s publishers is to figure out if search engine placement is really that important to the site’s overall mission. Not that you should completely ignore the issue, but if you’re going to spend money, there might be other things the money would be better spent on.
Remember that we sell qualified buyers to our advertisers. That’s why we make people qualify or pay for our publications. Why then would we want to dilute that pristine gene pool with every mindless wanderer who happens upon our publication’s web site?
We don’t, but it’s hard to stick with that position.
As a publisher, it’s important for you to know how many of your web site visitors also read your print publication, how many never read your print publication, and be able to provide advertisers with a demographic breakdown of this entire range of readership.
One of the things you should focus on is how many people are driven from your print publication to the web site. That figure will be helpful in dispelling the myth that search engine traffic to your site is the only way your advertiser’s message will get out, and give your advertiser confidence that you have some idea how advertising on your site will help accomplish their goals.
If you’re going to worry about search engine placement, make sure there is a solid business case for the users who will come to your site through a search engine.
For example, if you’re a b-to-b publication that covers industrial kitchen equipment, you’re going to have a hard time selling users who come to your site from search engines as qualified buyers to a potential advertiser.
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Make sure your site has tools to convert those occasional users into real readers and subscribers, and make sure that qualification and sales of those new visitors is being marketed to your advertisers.
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Unless you know that this person is a reader or subscriber, or unless you have some other way of knowing that the visitor is actually buying industrial kitchen equipment, a visitor who comes to your site through a search engine will be a difficult sell to any potential advertiser simply because you don’t know what their buying potential is.
Make sure your site has tools to convert those occasional users into real readers and subscribers, and make sure that qualification and sales of those new visitors is being marketed to your advertisers. Otherwise, your efforts to improve search engine placement will be nothing more than cosmetic.
Now that you’ve got the tools, how do you actually optimize for better search engine placement?
Search engines have two parts. The first part, the "indexer" or "spider" reads a list of web addresses and accesses those URLs the same way a user would over the Internet. The search engine reads every word and link on the page, follows the links to other pages, and stores the words in a database for later access. The second part, which is the interface most users see, is a database query tool that takes the keywords you type in and searches the engine’s internal word databases for URLs that contain the keywords.
Many search engines don’t run application pages, i.e., pages ending in ".exe", ".cgi," or ".pl". They’ve been trained to do this to keep them from executing user driven programs and consuming lots of CPU time trying to say, subscribe to a magazine. The problem is that many publishers use content management systems that pull stories from databases, and those content management systems use URLs with one of the above-mentioned extensions.
Also, search engines obey password restrictions, so if you have an area of your site that is password-protected, it won’t be indexed or read, and those pages won’t show up in the search results.
Some search engine read non-HTML file formats like Word, Excel and PDF, but none read GIF or JPEG files. So if you have words in your navigational elements and those elements are graphics, be sure to put text-equivalent links in the document so those words can be read by the search engines.
Search engines read special keywords that can be hidden in a document called "META TAGs." The keywords can be put there by your web designer to highlight important keywords that appear on the page.
A publication for industrial kitchen designers might use the words, "kitchen, industrial, industrial kitchen, oven, toaster, etc.," on its pages so that users searching for these terms would find their pages, even though those specific words aren’t in the content on the page itself.
Be wary of using companies’ trademarked names in meta tags. Several highly-publicized lawsuits have shown that courts view trademarks as sacred even when they’re contained in the meta tags of a web page. So using the names of competing publications, or of your advertisers in meta tags leaves you open to problems further down the road.
The problem with search engines, and the reason it’s hard to guarantee a specific position in the results, is that the people who run search engines are keenly aware that you are going to play tricks to get preferred placement. Many place higher emphasis on actual words contained on a page than they do on the meta tags, while others consider things like how frequently the word appears, or how recently the page was updated, to determine priority.
Also, search engines change their methodology for finding and ranking the millions of pages they index in a constant effort to get around deliberate "optimization" and provide searchers with better access to information. This means that whatever tricks you hear about, such as putting a word 72-times in invisible text at the bottom of a page, will only work until the search engine operators catch on and develop a tool to filter out that sort of trickery. To learn more about meta tags and how they work, vist http://www.meta-tags.com/tags.htm. For information on how search engines work, go to http://searchenginewatch.com/.
So while there are some things you can do to make your site more accessible, the first question you should ask yourself as a publisher is if you really want to. And once you get the visitors to your site, how do you convert them into qualified readers.
Only after you resolve those issues should you begin the difficult and ongoing task of trying to lure search engine users to your web site. And that’s the great question of 2002. 
Want to Make an Impression on Advertisers? Start with Your Circulation Statement
Advanstar and BPA International are producing four-color covers to the publishing giant’s circulation statements.
Beginning with the June 2002 statement, BPA will produce each Advanstar circulation statement with a four-color image of a cover of the magazine on the statement cover. Advanstar hopes the new look will help its publications stand out on media buyers’ desks, and BPA hopes more publishers will realize the power of the circulation statement as a sales tool.
"BPA is always striving to increase the brand recognition of our members," said Glenn Hansen, BPA's president and CEO. "Color covers of publications on circulation statements was a natural progression - and it has been 'road-tested' with good results in the past."
All BPA International members can take advantage of the new custom covers starting at about $800 per statement. BPA has been producing four-color statement covers for publishers since 1996.
"The buying and selling of media transcends simple numbers," said Francis Heid, Advanstar's vice president of publishing operations. "Media … need to make a connection on another level. One of those is visual. We view the addition of a four-color cover image to each BPA statement as a significant branding opportunity for our publications."
For more information on circulation statements, visit BPA International online at www.bpai.com. |
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In This Issue
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| Want to Make an Impression on Advertisers? Start with Your Circulation Statement
Final Analysis:
GCN’s creative, technical and business team analyzes PennWell"s Fire Engineering.com. See how business-to-business publication’s web site does in our constructive critique.
Sales Tip:
When Bounces Are Good
When sending out e-newsletters, be sure to save the bounce-back and unsubscribe logs. Advertisers want to see activity on a list, and this data can be used to prove that the mail isn’t being lost in someone’s SPAM filters or sitting around unread.
Mark your Calendar:
GCN Publishing
In-Print, On-Line, In-Person: Sure-Fire Ways Your Integrated Buys Will Generate Revenue
June 20, 2002
Hotel Monaco
225 North Wabash
Chicago, IL
516.767.3325
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June 26, 2002
The Union League Club
38 East 37th St.
New York, NY
516.767.3325
Register today!
William D. Littleford Awards Luncheon
August 13, 2002
Union League Club
NY, NY
For more info call: 212.661.6360
American Business Media Publishers' Roundtable
Sept. 19-21, 2002
A day long seminar on ad sales issues sponsored by the American Business Media Publishers Committee.
Chicago, IL
For more info call: 212.661.6360
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