Search engine optimization for Sunriders (Part 1)

Note: This is article was written by Owen Smigelski, Senior Counsel with Sunrider. Part 2 will be posted on Monday.

Search engine optimization for Sunriders (Part 1)

Introduction

Although the dot-com bubble burst a decade ago, the importance of the Internet continues to grow. Since 2000, the number of Internet users in the United States has almost doubled- to over 70% of the population. Annual online retail sales in the US are now over $200 billion, and growth is expected to rise with the increased use of smart phones, netbooks, and other Internet accessible devices. More than ever, an important aspect of supporting your Sunrider business is to have a presence on the Internet. If you do not have a website, it is easy and relatively inexpensive to set up a website, blog, or other online presence. Many people think that setting up a website is the hardest part—but actually the most difficult part is to drive traffic to the site and increase the site’s online visibility.

There are a number of paid options to help boost a site’s presence, including pay-per-click advertising (such as Yahoo! Search Marketing) and promotion services (which use various methods to drive traffic). Drawbacks to these paid services are high price (pay-per-click costs can add up quickly and often not generate leads) and questionable practices (promotion services and their client sites are routinely banned from search engine databases for spamming techniques). Recently, some businesses claim to generate leads and referrals to your website through a “free” report, but often this a tool to recruit individuals to resell a more detailed (and pricey) report—without creating leads for the original business.

The best, and most reliable, method of increasing a website’s presence is through search engine optimization (SEO). SEO programs can require time—time to implement, time to affect search results, and ongoing time commitment to monitor and update. However, successful SEO pays big rewards with ever increasing website traffic (and resulting leads and prospects). Although there are paid SEO services, there are a few tips the experts use that can be easily implemented on your website.

According to Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, there are 2 important factors for sites to perform well in an Internet search: 1) making great content that will attract links to the website, and 2) choosing a site design that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike. Internet search engines’ indexes are created by programs called “spiders.” Because of the massive amount of data on the Web, spiders essentially only consider text on a website, mostly ignoring things like images, frames, JavaScript, and Flash. These elements need to be present on a website to appeal to the human eye, but your focus should be on the text content of the site.

The tips below come from monitoring Sunrider on the Internet (part of my responsibilities as an in-house attorney at Sunrider) as well as my experience and background in SEO. The first section includes some basic tips that should be quick and easy to implement, and the second section focuses on some more technically advanced techniques. Search engines consider hundreds of factors for ranking a webpage in search results, but the tips below are some very important factors. Because search engines also keep their ranking programs confidential, SEO is not an exact science but one that requires testing and tinkering. The methods below are not an exhaustive list of SEO tips (many others can be found online or in SEO guides), but should help your website perform better in search engine results.

Basic SEO techniques

Good and accurate content
The most important, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of a website is the text content. Your site should be well written and free of grammar and spelling errors. The content should read easily and quickly provide the expected information. A satisfied visitor will likely look at other pages on your site and return in the future. Keep in mind that all content on your website needs to conform to the current Business Guide and Sunrider marketing guidelines. All IBOs are allowed (and encouraged) to use text and images that appear on Sunrider’s websites, because this content has been professionally designed and written and does not make any improper medical or income claims. Also, remember that all websites and new content need to be submitted through Sunrider’s Internet Compliance Form for compliance review.

Targeted content
A common mistake is to include too much content on one page. Each page should focus on one topic or subject, rather than covering many (and likely unrelated) topics on the same page. A website with 20 individual pages will rank better than a site with the same content on 5 pages. I have seen IBO websites that include a description of every Sunrider® product on one page. Not only is the page incredibly long, it is difficult for viewers (or search engines) to locate the pertinent content. A better solution would be to do a list of all products, and then link each name to another page that focuses on that specific product. Another possibility would be to do a page that only focuses on herbal beverages, another for foods, etc.

Title
Search engines treat the title of a web page as one of the most important factors in analyzing a page’s content (this is the title tag in HTML). The most important parts of the title are the first several words, so the focus of your page should be in the first few words. If writing a page about Fortune Delight®, the title “Fortune Delight information from Joe IBO” will be considered much more relevant than “Joe IBO’s information about the herbal beverage Fortune Delight.” Keep your titles short and concise. Do not pad your text with keywords or subjects that do not appear on your page. Also, it is OK to not put the ® symbol in the title tag to not confuse search engines.

Link name
It is essential to provide many links on your website (to other pages on your site, and outgoing links to other useful sites). Search engines analyze the text that provides the link, and then associates the linked page to the linking text. If you use the words “click here” rather than a word that describes the page you are linking to, search engines will assume the destination has something to do with “click here” (a Google search for “click here” shows the most popular links for these words). If you are linking to Sunrider’s site to purchase Calli®, the top link below is much better than the bottom two:

Visit Sunrider Shop Online to buy Calli
Visit Sunrider Shop Online to buy Calli
Visit Sunrider Shop Online to buy Calli

Outgoing links
It might seem counterintuitive, but it is important to have outgoing links to other third party sites. Search engines rank sites higher that provide links to other related (and useful) websites. Be sure not to do spam links, or links to bad websites; instead, provide links to Sunrider websites, IBO websites, or other related websites (such as nutrition sites or Wikipedia articles). You should also link to your Replicator site, and you can link to Sunrider’s blog, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube sites as well. Keep in mind to make links as specific as possible. If linking to buy Calli®, instead of a link to http://shop.sunrider.com, you should link directly to http://shop.sunrider.com/Shop/Product_51.asp?dept_id=7&pf_id=1061. Finally, there is no “magic” number of outbound links that each site or page should have (a couple is usually good), however, it is easy to have too many or too few.

Links between pages
Another important link strategy is to link between the various pages on your site. This can be done through menus and tables of contents, but it is also important to provide text links to the content of your pages. Spiders often cannot use (or ignore) links through graphics, so a page that has a list of links to all pages on your site (called a sitemap) should be posted at the bottom of each page for easy navigation by search engines. You can also link to your other pages in the main content as well.

New content
An important, and ongoing, component of SEO is to periodically add new and updated material to your website. A website that does not change is considered stale by search engines, and will eventually drop in the rankings. Adding more content several times each month will help boost the rank of the entire website.

Ignore meta tags
Many search engines now ignore meta tags (such as meta name="keywords" content="Sunrider”> and meta name="description" content="Sunrider Product Information”>), which can be easily manipulated. Some search engines will occasionally use the “description” meta tag in search results, but this is limited. Rather than focus on creating meta tags for your site, work on improving the site’s content and focusing on keywords in that content.