We know how essential good SEO is to Web site success. One important and often overlooked element is the ’snippet’ of text shown in search results pages (SERPs).

Snippets are important. Really important!

There is a human factor involved here: you want people to notice your site’s entries on the search results page and click through to it. This underlines the importance of getting your page titles and META description tags right, not only for good SEO, but for humans as well.

This requires a copywriting skill which is just as important as it would be for crafting finely-tuned ad copy, which is critical for online PPC ads. Where you appear in search results is vital, and the copy which users see is also the copy on your free and very important ad.

As if that wasn’t enough, if your SERP snippet is not representative of your site, misled or disinterested users will land on your site then go straight back to the search engine and try another site or re-search. Google is smart enough to spot this, will consider it to be ‘lack of relevence’ and your pagerank will be degraded as a consequence.

So, if you don’t get your snippet right, it can have a negative impact on your pagerank, which affects search visibility and therefore reduces inbound traffic from search engines.

Snippet updates – take action early

Our next challenge is the lack of control we have over our SERP snippets. It can take weeks, or even months for updated page snippets to appear on the search engines.

If you are developing a new Web site, it is important to get a relevant holding page on-line as soon a possible, not only to establish the domain and provide content for search engines to find and index, but also to register an optimum snippet, which will not be easy to change once your site is finally launched.

Here is an example of a good holding page with relevant copy. There are plenty of bad examples too – this is a useless holding page.

Take a look at this search and you will see what unhelpful and damaging snippets look like in a search results page. Many of these snippets will persist in SERPs long after the sites have fully launched.

New Web sites, particularly newly registered Internet domain names, can take many months, sometimes 6 to 12 months to become fully visible on search engines. Get something out there early, even if you are not ready for a full-on Web site.

Some businesses are in the fortunate position of not needing a Web site to help them generate business. Indeed, there is something very cool about being so good, you just don’t need a Web site.

Other businesses may have plans for a new Web site, but need to delay for budgeting reasons, or have a large project in the pipeline which could take many months to complete.

In all these cases, the new Web site could take a long time to show up in search results, particularly on Google which sandboxes new Web sites. Google considers established Web sites to be more credible and trustworthy, which directly affects how highly that site will rank in search results.

Here’s a good tip: even if you don’t need a Web site, or have plans to launch one in the future, get at least one search friendly Web page out there as soon as possible. This helps to get you established with the search engines and will pay dividends when the real Web site comes along, helping you to generate traffic sooner and achieve results quicker.

Make sure your holding page is search friendly and contains some content relevant to the business you are in. Don’t just sling up a ‘coming soon’ or ‘under construction’ page. Create something useful and relevant even if it doesn’t reveal the true identity or purpose of the site which will replace it.

The two biggest enemies of deep linking are frames and sites that operate from one container page, which is very common with Flash only sites.

This causes quite serious problems because all inbound links, including search result links, dump you in at the front door. This forces visitors to navigate through to find the information they are looking for, something which impatient users are reluctant to do.

With most well designed Web sites, search links and other deep links take you straight to (or near to) the information you want.

Not being able to link to a suitable landing page, also hinders online marketing initiatives such as email marketing and paid advertising.

The problems:

1. Search engine visibility is poor due to lack of indexable content.
2. Users cannot bookmark individual pages.
3. You cannot link to a specific page in a blog post or from a referral link on another site. Visitors must enter at the front door and hunt around for the information they are looking for.
4. It’s not possible to email links to particular pages. Again, you have to start at the home page and work it out.
5. Email marketing campaigns cannot deep-link to relevant parts of the site. Again, visitors get dumped at the front door.
6. PPC and paid advertising cannot link to a suitable landing page which can adversely affect their performance.
7. With frames, pages can get indexed on search engines but remain orphaned from the rest of the site when viewed without the containing frameset.

Don’t believe that forcing visitors to start at the home page is a good thing. In most cases, this is an added frustration which will cause users to bail out when they don’t find the page they expected after clicking on a link.

Without deep linking, sites experience poor visibility on search engines and lose out on a wide range of other traffic generating sources. This means fewer visitors, less traffic, restricted e-marketing opportunities and ultimately, reduced levels of business.

There is no reason to use frames these days. The many alternative methods include: back-end scripting, templating engines, frameworks, server side includes and even template-capable source code editing tools for smaller static sites.

Flash sites can also be designed to allow at least partial deep linking, so there’s no reason why lavish Flash sites can’t support deep linking where it’s needed.

So, deep linking is an essential enabler for driving traffic to a Web site. Incorporate this into your design and build process, but if the mistake has already been made, it is possible to deep-link enable existing framed or Flash sites without resorting to a total re-build.

Search Engine Optimisation can seem like a bit of a black art, but take care of the basics, and you can get 90% of the job done without consulting the rune stones.

Here is my top ten of essential SEO:

1. Domains: register your domain early or use an established domain; search engines can sandbox (effectively hold back) web sites with young or recently registered domains. It also helps to use a domain which contains a few prime keywords that relate to your area of activity.
2. Page titles: summarise the page, include three or four prime keywords which also feature in the page content. Also make page titles human-readable as you want users to see and understand the title on the search engine results page, and be interested enough to click through. Page titles are extremely important, so get them right.
3. Keyword and phrase research: put yourself in the mind of a potential user. Think about the words and phrases they are likely to use when you want them to find your site. Use these keywords and phrases in page content and metadata…
4. Metadata: write appropriate description and keywords tags which are tuned into the content on each page. Generic keyword and description tags are of limited value. Using relevant keywords in page URLs also makes a difference.
5. Web standards page coding: there are many reasons why web pages should be constructed in modern standards compliant coding, not least of which is that it helps search engine visibility no end. Good coding also helps overall usability and will make pages work better on a variety of different browsers and Internet connected devices.
6. Page content: not only should you give people a reason to visit your web site, but having good quality relevant text content is also important for search engines and PPC ads, which look for and analyse text on each landing page.
7. Keywords and phrases in URLs: formulate URLs with relevant text containing primary keywords. Avoid lengthy URLs loaded with query string parameters and ID numbers.
8. Sitemaps protocol: this is a file or dynamic XML feed which summarises every page on your site; search engines read and process these files to help them index your site more completely and often, more quickly, it’s like a short-cut around the search engine’s link discovery crawlers. SE sitemaps are particularly important for large web sites with a lot of content.
9. Inbound links: the more quality, highly ranked sites which link to your site, the higher your page rank will be. Consider creating good content specifically to bait inbound links, but write for people, not for search engines. Avoid driving the site from one container page – frames and single object Flash are particularly damaging. If you prevent deep-linking, this kills your traffic generating potential. Avoid link farms and don’t rely on reciprocal linking.
10. Analytics: don’t just look at the basic top-line figures, use your web analytics to mine deeper for information about how your site is being found, what works and what doesn’t. You can also experiment with content and design variations, track the results and continue a cycle of fine tuning to improve results over time. Creative use of analytics can also be used to examine user behaviour and test UI variations. It’s a powerful tool, use it.
11. Don’t cheat: your site can get penalised, or blacklisted altogether, if you attempt to beat the system. Don’t use link farms, autosubmit services, text cloaking or anything like that. Google is particularly hot on this and has a webspam team dedicated to the task of weeding out the cheats. Generally speaking, honesty pays in SEO.

This only scratches the surface of what you need to do in order to achieve good natural search rankings and generate traffic for your web site. Of course, just ticking these items off the list isn’t enough – to be truly effective, the work has to be done right.

Even getting 90% of the way there with your search marketing efforts will take some experience and expertise. Breaking into that last 10% will take a considerable amount of effort, which in many cases could be hard to justify.

Get the basics right and your web site will be found. Just make sure there is something compelling and usable when people arrive. Think beyond visitor arrival.

Finally, paid search. This is an enormous revolution in advertising, just look at the rapid growth and huge revenues of Google. This is also one area where thorough setup and incremental fine-tuning is essential, particularly when there is a lot of money at stake.

If you don’t take the necessary steps to make your Web site visible, you are pretty much wasting your time creating it in the first place.