Ranking high in search engines is one of the leading concerns for each web portal. Users normally don't go beyond the first few pages of results, and the best content will remain unused if not in the top results. Of course, they are other ways for users to learn about your topic aside from a search engine - these are the subject of the next chapter. However, during the promotion phase of the site, building good search results for each topic is essential for bringing new users to the site.

Achieving this goal is a sophisticated mixture of many components, some of them uder the immediate control of the topic manager. Up-to-date and high quality content is the most important among them - see Maintenance of the Introduction part, and Maintenance of the database driven Content part.

This chapter deals with the techniques of becoming popular on the Web - known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - and the ways to implement SEO on the GFP website. It explains in short the search engine algorithms and guides in optimizing keywords, attracting links, and earning clicks as means to improve your topic's rank.

Page ranking: how search engines work

Since optimizing for many search engines is a full time job for a whole team, we will only concentrate on Google and look for easy to implement, minimum workload solutions for getting your topic to be Nr. 1. Other search engines, especially leaders in other languages, may be considered once the GFP site ranks well on Google.

The quality of web pages is measured by Google in terms of their patented Page Rank factor (here you will find a long article on how it is calculated, written by the inventors of Google). Page rank measures the number of high quality sites that have linked (preferably from their home pages) to a given site and have thus "voted" for it, expressing appreciation. However, even a low page rank doesn't mean that a page will not pop up first in a very targeted search (see below for details). Amazon.com is not unpopular but still has a PageRank of 0 for reasons that will be discussed below.

As of this writing, the PageRank of the GFP home page is about 55-60%. This is approximate since the only way to see a page's rank is to install in your Internet Explorer browser the Google toolbar containing a small graphical PageRank meter. All other pages on the GFP site have a rank of zero, including the recent Topic of the month - Single Window Environment - which is listed Nr. 2 in a query on "Single window environment", preceded only by the UNECE website itself. A comparison: the World Bank's home page has a rank of about 70% but some of its subsections are ranked even higher (like the Learning site - around 80%).

Why is this so?

Search engines index the contents they find online to find keywords. Therefore, information contained in Flash animations, pictures, or databases, is likely to remain "hidden" from their automatic crawler programs (bots). This is why Amazon.com with its ever changing database content on the home page is not ranked, while the Nr. 1 search result for "Weapons of mass destruction" - a static, textual website mimicking a Microsoft error page - has a good ranking. Among the GFP partners, the WCO homepage which is basically only an entry point, has a rank of 0 while the internal pages in English and French are well ranked.

Further, search engine algorithms evolve over time. As in most other areas of life, this process is driven by the attempt to improve results and stop illicit practices. The drivers in search engine optimization today are keywords, links and clicks.

Keywords: In the dawn of the Web, the number of instances a keyword was found in the text and specific places of the page invisible to the visitor but used by the browser (called Title, Meta, Keywords, and Alt tags) were sufficient for the page to pop up when an user looked for the keyword. This caused the web developers to fill the Title, Meta, Keywords, and Alt tags with hundreds of repetitions of the essential keywords.

Search engines who make their living out of delivering quality results, stroke back and refined the algorithms to remove such pages from the listings, while their behaviour is referred to as spam - just like the e-mail spam. Spammer sites are removed from the ratings and ranked zero.

Over time, search engines evolved to count each link as vote. Accordingly, getting Link popularity (a great number of quality, inbound links) became essential. The good inbound links are always due to two important factors: good content, and personal, value adding relations to highly ranked sites. Banned linking practices are the use of low quality links like virtual Guestbooks, Free-for-all linking sites, link farms - forms of linking not regarding the content. Such "free farms" actually live from collecting the e-mail addresses of submitters, and selling them to spammers.

Click popularity is a new factor in increasing the Page rank. It measures how many of the clicks derived in a search result page were actually clicked on by the user, and how long did (s)he stay on the chosen page before returning to the search page. This gives indication on whether the human visitors found this page interesting, and the search engines increase or decrease the page rank accordingly. Malicious clicking behavior is still to be explored but there are indications that it may lead to the downgrading of clicks from poor countries where clicking on paid links is reported to have become a source of income.

Below, we will highlight how the topic manager can influence the ranking of his/her topic without getting banned for spam, basing on the selection of keywords, link populartity, and - hopefully - also click popularity. Don't forget this is not the same as rating Nr. 1 in a specific search but helps on the way to achieving high posoitions permanently, and not as an one-time exercise.

Keywords

The GFP site offers a specific tool to get the topic you manage high in the leading search engines result lists: the Keywords. When opening the Add/Edit topic form for your topic, you can fill in keywords specific to this particular topic (click the thumbnail picture to open an enlarged image of the form in a new window). The result of filling the keywords will be that every word you type in will be placed in a special attribute of the Topic page (the so called Keywords tag), and be directly visible to search engines who use such keywords, along with other criteria, to create their ranking of pages. Thus, without any programming, you will be able directly to influence your topic performance and visibility on the Internet.

When choosing the keywords for your topic, follow some simple rules:

• Avoid spamming: Don't repeat keywords unless they are part of different meaningful phrases. Even then, don't repeat a keyword more then twice in the Keywords field. For example, "trade facilitation, trade and transport, customs facilitation" is a legitimate set of keywords, while repeating "trade facilitation, trade facilitation, trade facilitation, trade facilitation" in the Keywords field of your topic would cause it (and probably the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing. An exception of this ban are words spelled differently in US and UK English, like harmonization/harmonisation, optimization/optimisation, etc. - they are different and target different user groups. And of course, you may also consider including keywords in other languages once specific policies are developed for multilingual content maintenance on the GFP.
  
• Target your keywords narrowly. You are the GFP expert chosen to manage this topic because of your expertise. The best way to pop up in rankings: try to produce a focused product for the professionals in this area. For example, as of this writing the Google search for "trade facilitation" produces about 96 500 hits while "trade and transport facilitation" was encountered about 3 120 times. It's obvious that a topic whose keywords are optimized to suggest that it is about "trade and transport facilitation" has better chances to get on top. Of course, this does not exclude targeting the people who look fo "trade facilitation" - with other phrases in the Keywords field, like "trade facilitation audits". Offline promotion will also be part of the riddle here - the GFP must ensure these key phrases are associated with the site - but this is the topic of the next chapter.
  
  Thus, we suggest that you write down several keywords and phrases important for your topic, and choose the most efficient ones by looking up in Google the number of hits that a search on each of them produce.
  
• Learn to know your audience and "competitors" for ranking in the phrases you have chosen. Most likely, your own organization will be one of the top ranking ones - which brings you to the next topic - synergies form linking.
  
  As we concentrate on Google, finding out numbers turns out to be not an easy task.
  
• Some advanced features available in other search engines are not found with Google. One example is the display of statistics of searches containing related words, available in some search engines, like www.mail.ru (click here to see the results of the number of queries for "trade facilitation" and similar therms in mail.ru for the last 30 days) but not in Google, or any major search engine.
• Not all of the Advanced search features in Google work equally well. Fortunately, the related: operator worked very well when tested with the domain www.gfptt.org (click here to see pages that Google finds to be related to the GFP page), so you may ask to extract for you keywords from a list of similar pages found in Google, and analyze them.

Link popularity

As mentioned above, search engine algorithms are complex and change over time. In addition, they are generally not well documented, being their company's intellectual property. Therefore SEO is to some extent the art of guessing what algorithms do.

However, the main search engines on the Net - Google and Inktomi who powers Yahoo, MSN, and AltaVista - have similar behaviour in one essential point: they try to reflect "the opinion of the Web". They not only index the pages themselves to see which keywords are contained there, but also account of how many other pages link to them, and which keywords these referring pages use to mention them. Also, higher rank is attached to links coming form the home pages of high ranked sites.

Possible actions of the topic manager to improve link popularity are:

• Improve linkability. The PageRank is higher for easy, short URL's. This is done by using another built-in tool, the Web shortcuts. In the Add/Edit topic form (click here to open an image of the form), a dedicated field is named Web shortcut. Any text you enter there will be used to create a short, easy to remember link. For example, the Electronic Commerce and Business topic would be addressable through http://www.gfptt.org/topics/eCommerce instead of the (still active but less linkable) http://www.gfptt.org/Entities/TopicProfile.aspx?tid=dff8632f-77e4-433e-8408-5a1515454921.
• Use deep linking. An user interested in yor topic may not find it if the link (s)he follows goes to the home page instead of the topic page. Asking your partners to link to http://www.gfptt.org/topics/YourTopic rather than to http://www.gfptt.org will not diminish the page rank of the Home page but will raise the rank of your topic's page.
• Use as wide as possible the fact that you belong to a high ranked organization. Insert deep links from a well ranked page on your organization's site (e.g. your transport department's main page)to your Topic, for example using a similar text: [name of organization] is a Core partner in the Global Facilitation Partnership for Transportation and Trade (GFP). We manage the topics {name the topics and insert deep links directly to their web shortcuts}.
• Interact. Use your contacts and your organization's usual communications channels to spread the word about your topic. Encourage people to write to you or to and send their comments. If you feel like this, start a Discussion group on the topic (it may be an internal one for Administrators and fellow topic managers, or an external one for all users).

Finding out how many pages link to your topic is difficult since the link: operator in Google at present only counts links leading to the entire domain and does not distinguish deep links. We hope the situation will improve as technology advance.

Click popularity

Other technique to measure the page's ranking is the measurement of Click Popularity - it shows how many of the users clicked on a link when it appeared in the search results, and how many of them remained on the site sufficiently long time to judge they found the site interesting ("sticky", as they call it in SEO jargon).

Tips to increase the click popularity of your topic:

• Improve linkability. After you have set the Web shortcut for your topic (using the field in the Add/Edit topic form - click here to open an image of the form), you can start e-mailing your friends and colleagues the address of your topic. Long addresses like http://www.gfptt.org/Entities/TopicProfile.aspx?tid=dff8632f-77e4-433e-8408-5a1515454921 get truncated in the e-mails and users get error pages. The corresponding web shortcut http://www.gfptt.org/topics/eCommerce will be found and clicked on, and if the content the site offers is good - also read and bookmarked by your audience.
• Edit the vicinity of the keywords to be meaningful. Don't forget the user sees a few words in the result list of the browser so you will have to show him/her in these few words that your topic is exactly what (s)he needs an dlooks for. The keywords themselves must be close to each other - this brings a better ranking.
• Make your topic an "organic landing page". In case a visitor comes to it directly and not through the home page, (s)he should still get the message of GFP and understand what you present - even out of context. This is mainly a matter of performing user testing, and getting comments from trade facilitation professionals on how this works.

Earning the results

Having reached so far, we assume you have set up and entered into the website the set of keywords, and done external promotion to attract external links which point at your topic. Now, a final touch is needed, and yor topic may end up Nr. 1 in its category:

• Review the text of the topic page, make sure it also contains the key words and phrases (the closer to the very beginning of text the better the ranking).
• Conduct the PR steps outlined in the next chapter
• Set up Google News Alerts to watch the headlines you will generate and the occurence of the keywords/mentions of your topic worldwide and send you e-mails with links to them
• Add the articles in the Press clippings section and connect them to your topic so they will appear there for further visitors

... and keep maintaining the topic after it stops being Topic of the month. Getting front page exposure is a head start and will probably help you go up in the ratings (if you make it for Nr. 1, your topic will also pop up when users click Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button). However, links age. Google is "hungry" for new content, it scans pages more frequently if they update often. On the other hand, the headlines will wander away from the Core Partners' and media's main pages to their news archives, thus diminishing your topic's page rank. Keep in mind that search engines seldom visit a link if it is in a deeper link level than the third, so a moved news is a lost link in terms of search engine visibility. Go ahead with personal interactions, and build up what the promotion started - the TTF Community Place for your topic.

Further readings

Need some more tools? Below a small collection:

• The Internet Archive shows pages the way they looked in a given period of time (well, not 100% exactly - click here to see, as an example, a snapshot of the infancy of this site in 2003)
• The Search Engine Watch is a good ressource on learning news in search engine optimization. It also features a RSS thread of news.