PHIL Ho, owner of Highland Coffee in Kampong Bahru, is no tech geek. But he created a website that shows up prominently on search engines. And he did not spend a single cent on advertising.
Like Highland Coffee, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with little or no promotional budget have gone online, banking on the vast reach of the Net.
Putting up a website does not guarantee that people will find you. However, getting a good ranking on major search engines like Google and Yahoo! may change things.
One option is through search advertising, which allows paid ads to appear alongside users' search results.
Phil ruled out this option for financial reasons. Instead, he got his hands dirty in the nuts and bolts of 'website optimisation' - the business of making your online property more visible on search engines.
Designing for search engines involves understanding how their crawlers or spiders (data mining programs) find, index and store information.
Here are some of Phil's tips:
Be spider-friendly. Put up content that is relevant to the target audience. The more pages of relevant text you have, the better you will be positioned in a search.
One common mistake is the excessive use of flash animation, images and audio. They don't matter to search engines, which are primarily text-based. Non-HTML codes like JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) also don't help your ranking. They act more like obstacle courses that spiders have to wade through.
Create a site map that contains text links to every page in a site. This makes it easier for a crawler to find all the information on the site.
Link to external sites that show up visibly on search engines and request for reciprocal links. Search engine algorithms today take into account these reciprocal links.
Do not spam. Embedding 100 of the same keyword in your HTML page is a bad idea. Search engines are wise to such tricks, known as spamming. It puts you at risk of being penalised or excluded from searches.
Highland Coffee's website may not be the first link to appear on the list when users type 'coffee and barista' on Google. But at least it appears on the first page, making his products and services 'more visible' than before, Phil said.
Phil monitors the tips posted on forums and blogs, and polls his customers on the keywords they would use to search for gourmet coffee and related products. Once every two months, he submits new keywords to the search engines to boost his ranking for those words.
The business benefits are evident: Every month, he gets about 50 e-mail messages and phone queries. This is more than double the queries he got in 2005.
