Coming to the aid of the search party

There is a definite logic to getting your company its critical share of search-engine visibility, writes Nick Miller. JUSTIN PARFITT would gladly pay to see the words "speed dating" in this sentence. Or rather, the Fast Impressions CEO would count his lucky stars (and soaring online visitors) if the words were a direct link to his website from Fairfax Digital. Advertisement: Story continues below A link from a leading media website is powerful voodoo in the dark art of SEO - search-engine optimisation. The internet offers hundreds of options to the lovelorn. But how does a business get noticed online? When a lonely heart goes to Google (or Yahoo or NineMSN), Fast Impressions wants to stand out among the hundreds of results that search engines deliver. When Mr Parfitt set up his website, he decided search-engine visibility was critical. "Google is used by something like 85 per cent of internet users, so we knew we needed to be in either the first or second position on any relevant keyword (search)," Mr Parfitt says. "Of course, for us the really major keyword (search term) was 'speed dating'." Google's Adwords system (or the Yahoo! and Sensis equivalents) sell prominent spots on the sponsored links displayed next to search results - but costs can soar if keywords are highly sought after. Fast Impressions, which turns over $1.5 million a year, pays $7000-$9000 a month to ensure its standout Adwords position. But the best spot for customer recognition is at the top of the first page of natural search results: free advertising on the internet's most-viewed billboard. Research by US web design expert Jakob Nielsen shows the snobbery of search. Internet users concentrate almost exclusively on the first two natural search results. After the top five, the rest may as well not be there (see breakout, right). "It's striking Rosetta Stone Hindi how little users read on the search engine results pages: just a few words read and bang, they click," Mr Nielsen says. Mr Parfitt noticed the same thing empirically with Fast Impressions. "If you're in the top two spots, you're OK - but if you're beyond the top three you're pretty much stuffed, people won't bother with you at all." So he started looking for advice on boosting and maintaining his Google rank - and soon realised he was not alone. As companies increasingly crave search-engine visibility, a whole industry is growing up around serving their needs. One member of that industry is Tom Petryshen, CEO of Amplify. "At the higher management level, CEOs are starting to ask what is this doing for us?" Mr Petryshen says. "A lot of (businesses) have paid a motsa for it through an agency or inhouse. The next stage is thinking about how to get traffic there. For a lot of companies it's a huge realisation that doesn't come until after the website is developed." Typically clients start with paid search because it's familiar. But Mr Petryshen introduces them to tracking tools that reveal how many visitors are coming from natural search. "When we start to look at the optimisation side it's like someone turned a light on for them," Mr Petryshen says. Optimisation is part common sense, part voodoo. Google's results are ranked in order according to the arcane PageRank algorithm, which essentially judges a website by the quality of other sites that link to it. But content is just as important. As Google's spiders crawl through cyberspace, they break websites down to keywords that can be matched with a search.

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