Every choice has an outcome

At the moment he claims top spot on Google in a search for "SEO Australia". He works mainly with small to medium businesses and estimates that almost three-quarters of Australia's websites have little or no search-engine optimisation. "The process is not very complex, but rather meticulous," Mr Peczek says. "The whole strategy is to develop a network, kind of like a net, which can catch people from different searches looking in different areas." Every page of a website can be optimised around three or four keywords. Website text must be "Google-friendly", Mr Petryshen adds. "You must make sure it matches with the way a consumer searches. For instance, most health insurance sites refer to 'health cover' but most consumers search for 'health insurance'." Companies can also go overboard with fancy web tricks that befuddle Google's web spiders, Mr Petryshen says. "We see them all the time - sites that put up a splash page with a bit of Flash," he says. "It does heaps more damage than having a more open home page with some content. Search engines also have a hard time getting past the query strings on database driven sites, and they can't read headings if they're images rather than text. "Most of the struggles we have are with design agencies, trying to convince them of the value of search. Every choice has an outcome." This may sound familiar to followers of the "simplicity" movement in web design, spearheaded by Jakob Nielsen. "To a great extent, search-engine optimisation is a repackaging of the basic usability principles," he says. "All the fancy graphics and multimedia mean nothing to search engines, which are basically the world's most influential blind users. "For 30 years it has been one of the prime usability guidelines to speak the user's language, and this turns out to be hugely important for search-engine optimisation as well." But Fast Impressions' Mr Parfitt warns that too much keyword optimisation may spoil a website. "As much as possible Fast Impressions does the Google thing," he says. "But you can go too far Rosetta Stone French and write some really crappy copy in pursuit of some intangible PageRank benefit. If the site reads 'speed dating speed dating speed dating', it doesn't really fit with our brand, which is more funky and style oriented." Once webpages are optimised, the next step is getting good quality incoming links. One factor is simply reputation, which is why small start-ups take a lot longer to get noticed, or have to go to greater extremes. Another factor is the competition. If you're in "porn, casinos or pills", Mr Petryshen says, it's going to take a long time and a lot of work to get noticed online. Similarly, the travel and accommodation industries are now well-established and hotly contested on Google's front page. "Our recommendation is to talk to your partners, see if you can get links from their websites," he says. "Look to directories such as the Yahoo directory. You build up over time." Links can be bought, but Mr Parfitt says he quickly noticed the value of a link from a reputable media site. "We don't spend any money on directory listings," he says. "I understand some of our competitors pay to be listed on certain pages and that seems to work quite well, but there's a cost associated. "If you get a lot of exposure in the offline press and media, that's worth way more than any crappy links from dodgy dating sites. Just do good PR." Advanet's Mr Peczek says the most prized links in Australia are from sites such as the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age or the ABC (all PageRanked eight out of 10). But move cautiously. Even if a site could instantly get 10,000 incoming links, Google may recognise this as cheating and penalise the site's PageRank. Google is very sensitive to optimisation.

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