Creative Leisure News

Technology issues that affect your business

The Search is On

Driving more traffic to your website via search engines.

by Lynn Carlisle, Carlisle Communications, Inc. www.craftcandy.com. (July 4, 2005)

A new study reveals that researching a hobby is the most popular online search activity today.

According to a new study (icrossing.com) released in June 2005, 53% of all U.S. online adults "use search engines most or every time they are online, trailing only email and general surfing as the activities most often done online." That�s 53% � or 71.5 million � of the estimated 135 million American adults who are online. (Online estimate, Nielsen//NetRatings)

Of those 53%, 88% are researching specific topics online. And of those 88%, 64% of men and 55% of women online use search to research their hobbies. In general, the study notes, researching hobbies is "the most popular online search activity."

Wow.

It�s even a bigger wow when you consider that the study found that researching a hobby beat out searching for medical information, career information, dating, and yes, porn. (What a surprise. . . or maybe that�s just information the respondents decided not share with researchers.) It�s helpful to note that this category � researching a specific topic � was considered separately from checking the weather, reading the news, shopping, or diving into the political blogosphere.

Of course, my first question is "how did they define the term hobby?" We�ll have to assume that hobbies included everything from fly fishing to knitting, do-it-yourself home repair to scrapbooking.

But even if only 1% of online searchers type in "yarn" or "latch hook" or "crochet" into their favorite search engine, that�s still a very big number.

The question is, if hobbyists and crafters are searching for information about their favorite activities, is your website easy to find? Will your website come up in the sought after "top ten" of search results?

Improving your search engine rank is a complex subject, one that is getting more complicated every day. And the business of improving your rank is a big industry all by itself, replete with consultants and seminars, even global summits. If you have a few hours for some more-than-light reading, you can dig into a great reference at SearchEngineWatch.com (http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters) for some highly detailed optimizing strategies.

Here�s a few quick tips:

1. Check your metadata. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) defines metadata as: "data about data . . . An example is a library catalog card which contains data about the nature and location of a book: It is data about the data in the book referred to by the card." For a website, metadata consists of hidden words and phrases that describe the nature of your website and includes key words that consumers might use to search for your site.

If, for example, for Mike�s site Creative Leisure News (where you are reading this article), his keyword list and description should include not only the words "Creative Leisure News," but terms like "craft business", "business commentary", "e-newsletter", "Mike Hartnett", "CHA", "SCD" and any other terms that might apply.

2. Include keywords in text. Be sure to include searchable text on your home page. Graphics are wonderful, but bots and spiders scan text, not images. So make sure there is at least a small amount of descriptive text on the page and that it includes important key words for your site.

For example, on Mike�s home page (www.clnonline.com), his name appears at the top of the home page, but it�s contained in a graphic, not in text. So when I Googled "Mike Hartnett", the Creative Leisure News home page did not come up at all. Instead, his FAQs page came up about 3 pages into the search. (I did find out that Mike Hartnett has a garage band, is a deceased Irish poet and a marathon ice skater. Really.) If the words "Mike Hartnett" were included in the first text on the page, his site might rise in rank in the next search, (somewhere between the poet and the skater but after the garage band guy, I�d guess).

3. Include keywords in your title tags. Each HTML page has a title. For example, when you arrive at Mike�s home page, the title reads: "Creative Leisure News - Home". (Your browser may also add its name to the title, as in "Creative Leisure News � Home � Netscape".) Search engines use these title tags as the title of each page they catalog. So, if you look up "Creative Leisure News" in Google, for example, you�ll be served this entry:

"Creative Leisure News - Home

Creative Leisure News, a twice-monthly report with the latest news and analysis that affects your business. Work for a paid subscriber? ..."

Where did Google get that text? From the title of the page plus the first block of text it could find on his home page. Just changing the title of the home page to "Mike Hartnett�s Creative Leisure News" would likely increase his rankings.

The Popular Get More Popular

In addition to grabbing the attention of the millions of online seekers of hobby information, one of the reasons you want to improve your site�s rank � and your traffic � is that search engines actually rank popular sites higher than unpopular sites, even those that may have the same keywords or information.

For example, if I were to launch a website called Creative Leisure Notebook and I included all the same text and metadata that Mike includes in his site (well, he doesn�t include metadata, but he�s going to work on that), CLNonline.com (Mike�s site) would still rank higher, even if the sites were in all others ways identical. (Yes, this would be illegal, and no, I�m not actually thinking about it.) The reason is that Mike sends out an email blast every other week (you probably got yours recently) notifying subscribers that he has put a new edition of the site online. That email blast drives traffic. And that traffic increases his site�s search engine rank. Search engines actually keep track of the clickability of links and give a higher score and therefore a higher rank to sites that have more clicks.

Just making small changes to your website can often yield big results on search pages. And remember, over millions of potential consumers are searching for specific product information, patterns, projects, tips, techniques and how-tos about their favorite hobbies online. Today. Right now. So get busy.

(Note: Lynn has worked in all media channels in the creative industries for the past 13 years. She currently manages www.caron.com and www.berroco.com. Lynn recently launched a sweet new venture called www.craftcandy.com that offers chocolate covered web services such as optimized web presence, e-newsletters, blogs and blog monitoring. You can reach Lynn a 252-752-9426 or lynn@craftcandy.com. To read previous Tech Topics articles, click on the titles in the right-hand column.)

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