SUZANNE WINTROB
Special to The Globe and Mail
Friday, November 10, 2000

Six months ago, Grading the Movies, Music & Games was a lonely Web site desperately seeking an audience for its hundreds of on-line movie, music and video-game reviews (http://www.gradingthemovies.com).

With just 3,500 page views a month, the site, owned by One Voice Communications of Medicine Hat, Alta., was hardly drawing the attention its creator had hoped for when he ventured onto the Internet to help parents and educators get a handle on what kids are doing outside the classroom.

"The site had been on the Internet for a year, yet we were doing virtually nothing on it," company owner Rod Gustafson recalls.

To get his site more exposure, Mr. Gustafson went looking for help.

He found it at Lake Country, B.C.-based Beeline Web Site Promotions Inc. He hired Beeline to come up with ways to raise the site's profile on search engines and lead more surfers to his site.

For just under $1,400, Beeline researched and armed Mr. Gustafson with 10 carefully selected keyword phrases most likely used by search-engine and directory surfers to get them to the site.

Beeline also monitors his site to make sure it continually contains those keywords and keeps its eye on about 10 search engines to ensure those phrases are well-positioned. Such maintenance costs Mr. Gustafson about $295 a month.

The payoff: http://www.gradingthemovies.com now attracts 40,000 page views a month, with traffic growing by 10 per cent each week, Mr. Gustafson says.

"It really forced us to put ourselves in our readers' shoes to determine what kind of words they were using to find us.

"We're better for it, not just because we're getting more hits off search engines, but also because it has helped us to define better who we are and what our priorities are," he says.

As he learned, designing a worthy Web site is only the first step to creating a successful on-line presence. Making sure people will find it is equally important.

And maximizing the power of the many search engines -- also called search engine optimization (SEO) -- is one of the best ways to start.

"Most people come to us after they have built a Web site and wonder why they aren't getting any traffic," says Ched Gaglardi, Beeline's chief executive officer.

Search engines and directories are preferred methods of Web-site promotion, favoured by 48.4 per cent of respondents to a July survey conducted by ActivMedia Research LLC of Peterborough, N.H. That was significantly higher than other strategies, including buttons and links (22.5 per cent), on-line public relations and press releases (17.3 per cent), reciprocal ads and links (16.2 per cent), affiliate programs (9.9 per cent), and paid banner ads (6.2 per cent).

Beeline (http://www.beelineweb.com) is one of a number of companies specializing in SEO. Mr. Gaglardi and his staff help clients define strategic keywords and phrases that best reflect Web-site content and then build the words or phrases into the coding of the site's static and dynamic pages to improve the positioning of the Web page with one or more search engines.

"Search engines are continually changing how they index sites so it's difficult to pinpoint one specific way to guarantee high ranking," says Nita Kang, founder of Mississauga-based Web developer WebSight Canada (http://www.websightcanada.com).

Search engines such as Netscape and MSN create listings automatically by crawling the Web, storing URLs and indexing keywords, links and text.

Directories such as Yahoo are people-based -- individuals submit brief descriptions of a site or the directory's editors review sites, with search matches based on these descriptions. There are still others, such as GoTo, that let customers buy keywords for a guaranteed top-spot placement.

Ms. Kang encourages clients to come up with about 30 keywords or phrases that best describe the product or service and then plaster the words everywhere -- in the text of the Web pages, in all advertising material, and within the coding (also called meta tags), which are placed in the HTML header of the Web page, providing information not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags, and those most applicable to search engines, are "keywords" and "description."

The key phrases that the Grading the Movies site uses include "family movie reviews" and "violence in videogames."

And Silanis Technology Inc. (http://www.silanis.com), a Montreal-based maker of electronic-signature software, recently added "e-sign" to its collection of keywords when the United States passed its electronic-signatures act.

WebSight has bought seven search terms, including "Web sight" ("People do misspell [Web site]," says Ms. Kang) and "Web market newsletter" to guarantee top ranking on GoTo, at a cost of a cent per click-through.

But keywords must be chosen wisely, says Donna Hindson, marketing manager at Toronto-based search engine MSN.ca. A Web site specializing in stamp collecting, she says, may find the phrase "world's stickiest site for sending letters" cute and catchy, but it's unlikely to score a hit.

Instead, it's best to stay with key phrases such as "history of stamp collecting."

Site submission must also be handled carefully. If you're appealing to a general audience, it could make sense to submit the site to dozens of search engines. But if you're targeting a niche market, be selective.

"Think of who you're going after," Ms. Kang says. "If your target market is only using the Top 10 or 20 search engines, then it's only necessary to focus on those. There are a lot of people who go for gimmicks on-line that say 'We'll submit your site to 1,500 or 2,000 search engines,' but if your market is only using the Top 10, then that's what you should concentrate on."

Jennifer Stewart, senior brand manager at Toronto-based Yahoo Canada, says it takes just five minutes to properly submit a site to the Canadian directory. It takes Yahoo Canada's "surfers" about six weeks to evaluate the site, ensure links are active, determine whether the user listed the site in the appropriate category, and post the site to http://www.yahoo.ca for search queries.

Once accepted by a search engine or directory, sites should constantly be updated and search engine activity should be monitored regularly.

"Many of us forget to look at what we've already put out there," says Robert Fine, executive director of the Economic Development Commission, Central Okanagan, Regional District (CORD) http://www.edccord.com.

"You could be drawing people to your site under the wrong pretenses [with] outdated links."

CORD, which promotes the Okanagan Valley, also hired Beeline to help its site. Mr. Fine acknowledges that the monthly monitoring service "has saved us a few times" by ensuring links are always active and that the information grabs the attention of CORD's target audience.

The Web site has seen a fivefold increase in Web traffic over the past few months, thanks largely to making strategic keyword choices and the monthly monitoring.

"It makes an awful lot of sense to make sure you don't overlook one of the very basics," Mr. Fine says.

"You can have the greatest Web page in the world, but if people can't find you, it's not going to do you any good."

High on the list: Tips for making

the most of search engines for your site

Search Engine Watch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com), created by Internet consultant and journalist Danny Sullivan, offers the following search-engine optimization tips:

Pick your strategic keywords: Each page in a Web site will have different strategic keywords that reflect the page's content. Pick phrases of two or more words, and you'll have a better shot at success.

Position your keywords: Make sure strategic keywords appear in crucial locations on the Web pages. Failure to put them in the page title, for example, is the main reason why perfectly relevant Web pages may be poorly ranked.

Have relevant content: Keywords need to be reflected in the page's content. In particular, that means you need HTML text on your page. Sometimes, sites present large sections of copy via graphics. It looks pretty, but search engines can't read those graphics. That means they miss out on text that might make the site more relevant.

Have HTML links: Often, designers create only image map links from the home page to inside pages. A search engine that can't follow these links won't be able to get at the inside pages, which are usually the most descriptive and relevant pages.

Solve this problem by adding some HTML hyperlinks to the home page that lead to major inside pages or sections of your Web site. Put them down at the bottom of the page. The search engine will find them and follow them.

Also consider making a site map page with text links to everything in the Web site.

You can submit this page, which will help the search engines locate pages within Web site.

Use meta tags: Meta tags can help overcome problems with tables, frames and other trouble areas.

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