January 4, 2012

Google “demystified” and other Internet tips

GREG MECKBACH

digital media editor

Companies trying to drum up business over the Internet in the construction industry should consider search engine optimization (SEO), according to a speaker at the Construct Canada conference and expo.

One option is simply paying Google Inc. for your company to appear in sponsored links that appear in Google’s search results, said Geoff Quipp, chief executive officer of Ajax, Ont.-based Search Engine People Inc.

“You can put your ad on the Google sponsored listings any time you want for chosen keywords, but you pay a fee every time somebody clicks on your link,” Quipp said.

“For a plumber in Toronto, that might be $20 every time somebody clicks on it. It can sometimes get very expensive.”

Quipp made his remarks during a presentation titled “Google Demystified” at the conference in Toronto.

Although companies can pay Google to have their sites appear at the top or along the right margin of Google search results, Quipp said 80 per cent of Google users only click on the non-paid, or so-called “organic” search results.

“High organic rankings lend credibility,” he said, adding studies have shown 44 per cent of people click on the first links shown in organic search results while 12 per cent click on the second link.

“People think that the ‘omnipotent, all-knowing’ Google bestowed a whole lot of credibility on you because they are saying that you are the Number One company for that keyword,” Quipp said. “It’s an impartial reference by a third party.”

Quipp went into some detail on the history of Google, explaining that organic searches are designed by Google engineers to find websites that are actually relevant to the search terms.

He said about 300 different calculations are used by the Google spiders (software that reads websites). It is believed that about 30 per cent of the total score for your site (which determines ranking) is based on what users put on their own sites, while the other 70 per cent is based on what other websites say about your site when linking to it.

He cited as an example the Google search with the terms “miserable failure,” which at one point yielded, as a top result, the official U.S. government biography of former president George W. Bush. Quipp said this occurred because thousands of Bush’s opponents published web pages where the words “miserable failure” were hyperlinked to the White House web page containing his bio, even though the words miserable and failure were not published in the bio itself.

In order to increase the probability that your site will come up high in organic search results, you need to think carefully about key words, and keep a list of words with “reasonable” search volumes.

Quipp took the audience through some examples, showing various numbers of searches plugging words such as “contractor” and “Toronto” into the Google adwords tool.

“Plug in what you do and where you do it,” he said.

“I’m an engineer in Toronto. It’s that simple. It will give you a lot more key word ideas. We can see that ‘engineers Toronto’ has been searched for 1,500 times in the past month, and that tells us, ‘Hey, that’s a pretty good key word.’ Or that it hasn’t been searched for at all.”

Quipp advised companies looking for high organic search ratings to put unique content on their websites that hasn’t been copied and pasted from somewhere else.

“We cannot just take other content from other sites out there, post it as our own and expect them to rank it,” he said.

“The people at Google have more PhDs than NASA. They figure that out pretty quickly.”

Although linking is important, he said Google penalizes websites with too many.

“If you try and stuff dozens of links down at the bottom of your page, and that’s an eyesore, that might be looked at as gaming.”

Print | Comment