How big is your Web site? Thousands of pages? Millions? If it's larger than a few hundred pages, you face special problems in search engine optimization that don't plague smaller sites. Let's talk about successful SEO with even the largest site.
Big Web sites pose some new challenges for SEO. If you can gather your entire Web team into a conference room, then you don't have a big site. You might have a very successful business, but you have problems different from the ones we tackle in this fourth part of our SEO series.
In Part 1 and Part 2, author Jennette Banks provided an overview of search marketing and the basics of keyword planning and optimization. In Part 3, we focused on getting your pages into the search indexes. In all three articles, you saw how all Web sites, regardless of size, must work to attract traffic from Internet search engines like Google. But big Web sites really are different. If your Web site consists of thousands or even millions of pages, you'll run into specific SEO challenges.
In Part 4, we address the unique problems of large Web sites. We'll examine why the large Web teams that maintain big Web sites cause problems for search marketing, and we'll dissect the technical challenges of global Web sites and sites with many dynamic Web pages. These three SEO challenges bedevil many large Web sites.
Persuading a large organization to focus on search
SEO for large sites can be problematic because so many different groups have to do the right things to make it work (see Resources). Regardless of how your Web site and Web team are organized, they are divided into groups, and those are what cause the problems. Depending on your site, you might have some or all of these problems:
- Multiple specialist teams. The developers don't talk to the information architects and the marketers don't work well with the Web masters.
- Multiple product sites. Everything you sell has a separate team that designs its Web experience from scratch.
- Multiple audiences. Each marketing team designs a separate Web site for one or more target markets.
- Multiple countries and languages. Different teams work on the Bolivia site and the Brazil site.
- Multiple technologies. The marketing pages use a portal server and the product catalog uses an e-Commerce server -- and each technology is from a different vendor.
Although it seems daunting, you can organize multiple Web groups across your fractured Web site to act as a single search marketing team. You can lead each group in concert rather than scatter your effort. As you learned in the previous articles in this series, the owner of every Web site must take key actions to ensure that its search marketing program succeeds, but big sites need a more organized approach:
- Train your Web team. Programmers must use JavaScript coding appropriately. Copywriters must use the targeted keywords in their text. Your Web team won't know what to do unless you teach them. None of these low-level tasks are unique to large Web sites, but what's different in large organizations are the numbers of people who need to know them. A comprehensive, organized training program is essential to a large site's success.
- Set standards. Create a standard for the proper way to code a robots.txt file. Change your existing content standards to ensure each page has a title. In short, make sure all of your standards reflect SEO best practices. When you provide a standard, each specialist will do what's needed for search marketing because it's already their job to comply with these standards. The difference between small and big sites is that big sites are process-driven. When you add the right SEO practices to your standards, you use those processes to your advantage.
- Enforce compliance with the standards. Where possible, check compliance with existing processes, such as page and code reviews, and other project checkpoints. You also might need to implement some new checking methods. If the Web masters ignore your standards on redirects, use a spider that checks redirects and flags improper ones. If the copywriters blithely overlook the need for keyword-rich titles, have your spider examine every page on your site and report which ones have missing titles. Enforce compliance somehow -- with existing processes or with new ones that you invent.
- Measure your site's progress. Keep track of search rankings for critical keywords. Measure traffic to each part of your Web site and monitor trends. Count the number of pages that comply with your redirect and content standards. Then regularly share the results with the executives responsible for each part of your Web site. Publicly share the scores of each business unit to embarrass executives, which impels the needed behavior from their staffs.
Granted, this kind of organizational change is not for the faint of heart. But if you get your entire Web team working together to follow the correct practices, your big site will derive advantages from its well-known name (causing searchers to click on your pages), your high-quality content (causing other sites to link to yours), and your larger marketing budget (allowing you to invest in better design and technology). For more about getting your team to work together, see Resources.
The key to success is persuasion. Calculate the benefits of increased traffic on your site to show the value of search improvement. Embarrass everybody with information about how your competitors rank higher in the search results than your company. Appeal to your team's own experience as searchers to convince them of why it's important. Remember, no one starts the day with the goal of sabotaging your search efforts -- they just aren't aware of the impact they have. The more you can inform them and make them part of the team, the faster you'll see results.
You work there. You know what causes new ideas to catch fire in your company. Does your organization respond to e-mail newsletters? Conference calls? Blogs? Podcasts? Web seminar? Or do they need a more personal touch? Hand-carry a stack of PowerPoint charts to every regional office if you need to. Make sure that your message is delivered and received -- that's how you'll change behavior.
Once you have buy-in from your team members and they work with SEO in mind, you'll probably still face two huge challenges: how to conduct search marketing across a global scope and what to do with dynamic Web sites.
Search marketing in a single country in one language has its difficulties, but problems multiply as the scope of your Web site adds countries and languages. Let's look at country issues before tackling language problems.
Searchers often want to limit their results to a particular country, especially when they're ready to buy: They want to find a vendor in their country that uses their currency. Simple, right? Well, not exactly. To determine the correct country for each page for organic search is no more than a good guess by the search engines.
So how do Google and other search engines guess your page's country? They use the IP address of your site's domain ("mydomain.com") to determine the country that houses your site's Web server (see Resources). If your Thailand pages are actually hosted in Thailand, you're fine. If all of your pages pertaining to Southeast Asia are hosted in China to save money, the search engines would incorrectly assume those Thai pages pertain to China.
Actually the search engines are a bit smarter than that, but only a bit. In addition to looking at the host country, they also look at the top-level domains (.com, .de, and others) to determine the country. No matter where it's hosted, a page that uses the country's top-level domain (such as "de" for Germany) in its URL (such as "www.deutschefirma.de") will be included as a page from Germany.
Unfortunately, most global Web sites name every page on their sites with the ".com" top-level domain. IBM, for example, names its Germany home page as "www.ibm.com/de", which the search engines don't recognize as a page from Germany unless it was hosted within Germany. This is critical because any searcher limiting the results to pages from Germany won't find this page from IBM.
It's fortunate that savvy searchers are accustomed to this search engine failing, so they regularly search for pages in German, rather than from Germany, to find the pages they want. In the long run, expect search engines to get smarter about identifying pages like IBM's Germany home page as part of the right country, and at that point, searchers won't need to be so savvy.
Google and Yahoo!™ are the big search engines in the United States, but what about the rest of the world? Google actually is number one in many countries, but pay attention to local search engines that operate in one or two country markets (see Resources). Make sure to use Search Engine Watch reports (see Resources) to keep up with country market shares so you can target the right search engines for paid placement and measure traffic from the right engines.
It's tricky for search engines to identify the proper country for a page, but they do a considerably better job at detecting a page's language. Search engines generally look at three pieces of evidence to determine a page's language: its language meta tag, such as <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ja"> for Japanese; its character encoding, such as <meta http-equiv="content-type" content= "text/html; charset=shift-jis">; and an analysis of its content. Because the language and character encoding tags are frequently coded incorrectly on pages, they are used only when the search engines can't identify the language by analyzing the word patterns on the page (see Resources).
For the most part, search engines will correctly detect the language of your pages without any action on your part. However, for pages with very few words, it's critical that you correctly code language and character set meta tags on your pages or the search results won't include your pages when searchers look for pages in a specific language.
But getting the search engine to detect your page's language correctly is only the start. You'll run into problems if you perform all of your SEO tasks in English and simply translate the results to other languages. Suppose you choose the most popular keywords for your products in English and then translate them to German: That won't ensure that you chose the most popular German words. The translated words are linguistically correct words, but not necessarily the optimal ones for search. If you choose correct but less-used keywords in your German campaign, your results will suffer (see Resources).
After you painstakingly craft the English copy on your pages to use the correct keywords, and to use them in the right amount on each page, don't expect that a standard translation will retain your English-language optimization. You must optimize the German page the same way you did the English page for similar SEO impact.
Keep these tips on language and country in mind as you execute your global search marketing campaigns -- you'll stay ahead of your competition.
Large Web sites are typically loaded with dynamic pages -- they make a large site much easier to maintain with fresh content and an up-to-date design. But it can be trickier to optimize dynamic pages for SEO success.
Google treats the content of a dynamic page the same way it does static pages, so all of the content optimization techniques that were discussed in previous articles in this series are required for dynamic pages, too.
With a static page, your copywriter can merely edit the HTML file containing the page's content and change it -- adding a keyword to the title, for example. Dynamic pages aren't so simple. Because a dynamic page is generated on the fly by a program, the content of the page can come from two different kinds of sources:
- A database. Usually the information on the page that changes -- the dynamic part -- comes from some kind of relational or other database. For example, a product description page might draw information from your e-commerce catalog database. In fact, dynamic pages can draw content from many sources, even ones that don't call themselves databases, such as content management systems.
- A template. The information on the page that doesn't change, such as your company name and the "Add to cart" button that you have on every product page, is usually kept in a template file that also specifies what HTML tags are used to generate the page.
To optimize the content on a dynamic page, you first must figure out where the content comes from before you can change it. The content is managed by whatever group updates the database -- perhaps copywriters for a content management system or data entry operators for a product catalog.
The template, on the other hand, is usually controlled by your Web developers. In some cases, the template is a separate file that is easily updated -- most content management systems work that way. At other times, the HTML is stored inside the software program itself, so the programmers must modify the software to change the HTML.
Changing a dynamic page usually takes more persuasive powers and time than getting a static page changed. That's the bad news. The good news is that when you persuade your extended team to change one dynamic page, they usually change them all. With static pages, when you've changed one, you've changed, well, just one. Quality control is also typically eased by using content from databases because the data entry programs can check the input more easily than an HTML editor can for static pages.
As challenging as SEO can be, the challenges multiply on large sites. With so many teams managing the site, it's hard to get them all rowing the boat (actually, your Web site) in the same direction. Add in the complexities of multiple countries and dynamic pages, and you have a recipe for frustration.
But if you thought that SEO can't really work on a big site, now you know that it can -- and just how to do it.
Learn
- Search marketing for large sites: Read Mike Moran's article in his August 2005 Biznology Newsletter.
- Working Together: Check out the importance of teamwork in this article by Mike Moran (this grew out his "Big Company and Big Site Search Marketing" session at the March 2005 Search Engine Strategies conference).
- Geolocation by IP Address: Get more on the benefits of geolocation and techniques to apply it in Andrew Turner's article in Linux Journal.
- Country-based search engines: Check this site for lists of local and regional search engines -- currently over 2,600 search engines and 200+ countries, territories and regions.
- Search Engine Watch: Find a multitude of SEO resources, including lists of country market shares so you can target the correct search engines.
- Language META tags and character encodings: Ensure search engines correctly identify the language on your pages with meta tags and character sets.
- Multilingual SEO for world markets, Part 1: Read David Leonhardt's article for more on multilingual keyword research.
- Search Engine Marketing Inc.: For tips on these and other steps in driving search traffic to your site, check out the new IBM Press book written by this article's authors.
- Safari book store: Find a large selection of books on related topics.
- Web Architecture zone's technical library: Find articles and tutorials on various Web-based solutions.
Discuss
- developerWorks blogs: Get involved in the developerWorks community.
Coauthor of the book Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer with more than 20 years experience in search technology working at IBM Research, Lotus, and other IBM software units. He led the product team that developed the first commercial linguistic search engine in 1989, and has been granted four patents in search and retrieval technology. He led the original search marketing strategy for ibm.com, as well as the integration of ibm.com's site search technologies. Beyond his search work, Mike has spearheaded ibm.com projects in content management, personalization, and Web metrics. Mike is currently the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, responsible for the site's design, information architecture, technical architecture, and operation.
Bill is responsible for a team of Search Engine Marketing Strategists who help Fortune 200 companies manage their enterprise SEM programs with a global perspective. Bill is currently regarded as a leading expert in both enterprise and international SEM strategy, and is the coauthor of the highly acclaimed book Search Engine Marketing, Inc., published by IBM Press. Bill earned a B.A. in Asian studies and Japanese from the University of Maryland, Tokyo Campus, and a B.S. in international business from California State University, Los Angeles. He is also a veteran of the Marine Corps.
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