With the failure of banner advertising on the WWW, savvy ecommerce companies are looking at search engines with renewed interest. And why not? Search engines, far from dying out, remain the largest source of Internet traffic, and they can provide up to 90% of the new visitors coming to a web site – at virtually no cost to you.

Search engine optimization is the process of "weighting" your web site's pages and structure, so that your pages are ranked higher in search engine listings, so that more people will see them.

As a corollary to our broader business of Internet and interface development, we have been working with search engines for many years. Because we have business backgrounds, we have taken business approaches to search engine optimization. This process has produced measurable success for our ecommerce customers.

1. Develop a set of keyword and key phrases that potential customers might use to search for your products. We start by talking to your sales, marketing, and customer service people, and accumulating a root set of keywords and phrases.

2. Compare those to our databases of actual search words and phrases that surfers use to search on the Internet. Remember, on the search engines, the customer is king. If they are searching for "sailing boats", and your keyword is "sailboats", you may never be found.

Research for a stained glass window company showed that there was huge demand for replicas of U.S., British, and French cathedral windows – and none whatsoever for Italian or Spanish cathedrals. This not only changed their Internet strategy, but allowed them to predict inventory and develop their supply chain more precisely.

3. Expand the search sideways into related words and phrases. We always find additional keywords through this process. Sometimes we uncover entirely new markets for companies.

For a hotel chain, we learned that long-term (extended-stay) customers were a market far too large to ignore; they moved into that market profitably.

4. Prepare a chart of search intensity for the original keywords your people have given us, plus the extended search engine placement set we have located.

5. Collaborate again with your marketing department, and decide on which keywords to target for higher ranking. This second iteration pays off nicely at the bottom line.

Your marketing department knows your profit margins, and we don't. Some markets are worth pursuing, even if of modest size. Other markets aren't worth chasing no matter how big they are. This is a case where collaboration equals increased ROI.

6. Restructure your web site pages for maximum visibility on the search engines. This might include changes in titles, descriptions, meta-tags, content, and link-weighting. Sometimes it means adding bait pages and hallway pages. Depending on your preferences, we can do it ourselves, or work with your engineers and designers.

This is often a delicate balance. Search engines indexing robots are relatively dumb mathematics-based creatures. They like text. Plain words. They ignore images and design. So we often use workarounds to maintain the present site design.

7. Resubmit the web site pages to the search engines, either manually or with customized programming. (We don't use off-the-shelf submission software; the search engine administrators tend to penalize pages submitted that way.)

What makes this search engine optimization process unique? Well, most web development companies simply ask you for keywords and start modifying your pages – in other words, steps 1, 6, and 7, at best. This is extremely superficial, and a dubious way to increase your revenue.

Hastings is able to offer a much more effective search engine optimization process for several reasons:

1. We recognized the importance of monitoring users' search behavior when the search engines first appeared, and started collecting data. We have terabytes of search data, dating from 1997, organized by industry.

2. We have high-end information science and database talent in-house, and can extract applicable knowledge from the raw data. We have been crunching this data for a long time.

3. We have business backgrounds. We work with your marketing and financial people to complete the loop – from research, to feedback, to the bottom line.

4. We concentrate on broad compatibility with all search engines, not labor- and cost-intensive spamming techniques.

What We Don't Do

"Cool" stuff like IP-specific page delivery (fooling the search engines by delivering content different from what a normal visitor sees). Technically, we know how to do this – and if we want to, we can trick the search engines for awhile. But eventually the search engine administrators catch on, and then they ban your site from their listings forever. It comes under the category of, "Never was the horse that couldn't be rode – never was the rider that couldn't be throwed." Sooner or later, you get "throwed." It's not good business.

Guarantee "Top Ten Listings" for any and every site. It's a scam. Firstly, anyone can get you a top ten listing for your company name, if it's remotely unique. Search engines are getting better, and if your company name is www.blueheronhotel.com ... trust us, it doesn't take much work to get you into the top ten for the search phrase "blue heron hotel." It's equally easy for SEO shops to pick a few phrases that don't have much competition, optimize your site for those phrases, and say "Look, we got you into the top ten!" At Hastings we concentrate on getting your site:

1. As high in the listings as we can.
2. For a broad range of search strings.
3. Of the type that would be used by paying customers.

And, sometimes, a prospective customer is just out of luck, and we tell them so promptly. E.g., if you wanted top ten for the word "guardian", it would cost you plenty, because we would have to get you above the London Guardian, Bay Area Guardian, Trinidad Guardian.... There are a lot of newspapers named Guardian on this planet.