By Peter Wolchak

A small storefront in a nondescript strip mall in a quiet Toronto suburb: it’s hardly The setting you’d imagine for an international printing business.

Yet Robert Kennedy occupies this space and sells printing services to clients around the world, with about 70 per cent of his business originating in the U.S. He attributes his success to the Web, and specifically to search engines. That’s because a user typing a printing query into any major search engine will likely be directed to his company, Reprotech Digital Media Services. A Forrester Research study found that search engines are the number one method surfers use to find Web sites, so ranking well is a huge business advantage for Kennedy.

“If you do a search right now on the major search engines for the key words my Web site promotes, I will guarantee you that I am in the top 10 results,” he said.

To see this work in real time, fire up a browser and type “custom printed postcards” into the search field of any search site (a list accompanies this article). Look for Kennedy’s weprintcolor.com or its Canadian sister site,weprintcolour.com.

If you typed the query into Google, you just searched at least 1.4 billion Web pages worldwide in more than 25 languages.

So how does Kennedy’s three-person business beat the world’s largest printing companies to the top of these lists? “When I rank well it’s no fluke. It’s from doing a lot of homework.”

“My ultimate goal is to own the word “printing” on the Internet. When someone goes to a search engine and types in one word-printing-I want that search to come to me. I’ve been working for three years on that.”

Kennedy spends time each day researching the latest developments in search engine design and tweaking his site to ensure it continues to score well. He stresses, though, that he does not employ any of the range of underhanded tricks, such as loading his site with hidden keywords to boost his ranking, that many Web designers had employed for years. These practices are unfair, Kennedy said, and search companies are getting very good at detecting cheaters.

Kennedy does not have a Yellow Pages ad for his company and traditional marketing-such as newspaper ads-take a backseat to his Web initiatives. This emphasis on Web marketing has improved his site traffic and increased e-commerce revenue.

Following is a basic checklist of actions you can take to boost your Web site’s traffic. All are within the reach of any small business, and it’s important to understand these steps even if your site was created by a Web design expert. An individual with Web design expertise may not be knowledgeable about Web marketing, and it’s prudent to ensure these actions have been taken.

Make yourself known

The first and most basic step is to ensure your site is registered with all the major search engines, such as Excite, AltaVista or Google. Search sites scan through the Internet on a regular basis-a process known as spidering or crawling-but with millions of Web pages added to the Internet every day, unless you make some noise, your site may be overlooked.

“It’s much safer to submit at least your top-level page, so the crawler will visit it directly, rather than leaving the visit up to chance,” said Chris Sherman, associate editor at Search Engine Watch and the owner of British-based Web consultancy Searchwise.

Visit each search engine and type in your company name. If it doesn’t appear, look up and follow the submission process set out by each site. Yahoo, for example, requires that all commercial sites pay US$299 to even be considered for inclusion. Yahoo is a human-powered directory of sites, as opposed to an automated search service, and its staff determines which sites are worthy of a listing. Dmoz.org is a similar directory but does not charge fees, nor do most search sites.

Craft meta tags carefully

A meta tag is an HTML element used to identify the contents of a Web page. At one time, search engines relied heavily on meta tags to determine page ranking, and while engines now rely less on tags they still carry some weight in your overall score.

For search purposes, the primary tags are Keywords and Description, and Kennedy recommends brevity for both. “Use 10 or fewer keywords; more than that and you just dilute your words. The fewer you have the more accurately you can think about each page.”

To check this on your own site, open a page in a browser and select View, Source from the menu. Check the Keywords and Description tags to see if they accurately reflect the content of each page.

Text is good

Many Web pages use photos and graphics to convey information, and while this is attractive, it is also difficult or impossible for search engines to collect this data. For example, suppose your food services company is promoting its new line of Greek entrees so you post a lovely image of a Mediterranean island with the words “Try our new Greek cuisine” painted into the graphic. Surfers think it looks great but search engines can’t see the words.

Instead, render the “Greek cuisine” message as text below the image, rather than as part of the image itself.

In general, convey all your important messages as text. “Search engines don’t respond well to pages with no text,” said Google spokesman David Krane in Mountain View, Calif. He recommends putting your core company message on every page. Nike, for example, could use “Welcome to Nike, the leader in athletic footwear and apparel.”

Tag your images

Every image, logo and illustration on your site should be Alt tagged. Alt, which stands for Alternative, is an HTML function that can be used to add a text message that pops up as a small box when you hover your mouse over an image.

This is an aid to surfers but, perhaps more importantly, it’s legible by search engines. That means that if you sell farm equipment online, each Alt tagged image of a tractor adds that word to your site and improves your ranking when anyone looking to make a purchase types “tractor” into a search.

Make connections

Many sites contain links to other related sites. For example, you are at http://www.allaboutgodzilla.com and you see a link to http://www.kingkongcentral.com. These types of links are important for a business because search engines assume that if a lot of other people have chosen to link to your site, then it must be a worthwhile destination meriting a better ranking.

“Say your site is about running shoes. Pursue links from other important sites in that community,” said Google’s Krane. “This may mean simply sending an e-mail to the other site saying ‘I have a site about running shoes and it would be relevant for the readers of your site to link to my site, and I’ll reciprocate.’

“This is very effective, because Google looks at all the links your page has to other pages. This is about 40 per cent of our ranking.”

Reprotech’s Kennedy puts great store in links. “Invite as many possible links to your site as you can. There’s no cost and both parties win.”

Consider paying

Search companies have stepped into some controversy lately by accepting payment for two plans: paid inclusion and paid placement.

Paid inclusion charges you a fee to ensure your site is indexed by the search engine.You buy the search engine’s attention, but not a specific ranking, which means if you have an uninformative and uninteresting site, it will get looked at but you may still rank far down in any search.

This move toward paid inclusion is a response to the rapid growth of the Web, according to Sherman. “The Web is so huge and growing so quickly that search engines have a hard time finding pages on their own. Paid inclusion gives webmasters the assurance that their pages are included in an index, and furthermore that the listings are relatively fresh. It’s a win-win-win for searchers, webmasters and the search engines themselves.”

Paid placement has been far more controversial, as it guarantees that a site will rank highly regardless of its quality.

“The engines are essentially selling links and being disingenuously mealy-mouthed about labelling them [clearly], rather than calling them paid links,” Sherman said. “But the engines are being held to a higher standard than, say, the Yellow Pages, where your ad size is determined by how much you pay.

“So while I think the engines should just come clean and label the paid links as ads, I also think that most people can recognize an ad when they see one.”

Google, for example, does not practise either paid inclusion or placement, although the site does attach ads to its searches.These are labelled “sponsored links.”

Reprotech’s Kennedy shells out money for paid inclusion but hasn’t found it essential to his marketing efforts.

“Google is always my biggest referrer, by far. I pay AltaVista money to spider my site every Friday, but no search engine compares to Google.”

Paid inclusion and placement have worked for some, so you may wish to consider them as part of your overall Web marketing initiative.

Stay current

Web design and technology change constantly, which means the rules and algorithms by which search engines operate could be different from day to day. The techniques above are a starting point for further investigation and constant learning.

Kennedy said he subscribes to a number of webmaster mailing lists and keeps a close eye on the information pages of the major search engines. Also,http://www.searchenginewatch.com is a good place to stay on top of recent developments.

Kennedy also recommends typing your name and keywords into a few search sites every few days, to ensure your ranking has not slipped.

All this work, he said, can pay off. “I’ve done T-shirts for people in Australia, business cards for people in Britain, Scotland and Brazil, and of course the U.S. Last year 70 per cent of my overall revenue came from America, and 100 per cent of that is directly attributable to a Web presence.”

Web searches

Forrester Research - http://www.forrester.com

Reprotech - http://www.weprintcolour.com

Search Engine Watch - http://www.searchenginewatch.com

One engine does not fit all

No one search engine can be considered the best in all situations, according to Chris Sherman, associate editor at Search Engine Watch. Each is suited to one category of topics but less useful for others.

“They all do different things, and do different things well,” he said. “While Google is great for many types of searches, AltaVista or Northern Light runs circles around it for others. Each engine has a personality, with distinct strengths and weaknesses. You should really learn about each one, then choose the appropriate one for your information needs.

“You’d never think to look up a phone number in the encyclopedia, or look for a dictionary definition in an almanac, for example, but this is exactly what people are doing when they rely only on their favourite search engine.”

Below is Sherman’s field guide to the major search engines.

www. altavista.ca

AltaVista is a solid choice if you’re interested in lots of results covering all possibilities. For narrowly-focused results or a specific query, start somewhere else.

www.excite.ca

Excite will supply you with an intelligent guess at what you want. Use a different engine for more traditional keyword matching.

http://hotbot.lycos.com

HotBot will deliver pages that other Web users have found useful for a specific topic. There is also an advanced search area for more in-depth queries.

www.google.com

Google sits between narrowly-focused results and a range of potentially useful sites. It is a good choice if you need a broad look at the Web and you’re not sure which other search engine to use.

www.yahoo.ca

Yahoo is a good choice when you want to browse for information, but you’re better off with another service if you’re serious about searching for something specific.