Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Trust in your website, that is.

As soon as you spend any time looking into search engine optimization (SEO) you run into PageRank. This is Google's original, big innovation: rank the relevancy of web pages by looking at who links to them.

It's pretty easy to game PageRank, though. Build reciprocal links, join link farms and pay for text links and you'll have a pretty good PageRank. That's why PageRank, as you see it on the Google Toolbar, isn't very important. It's just easy to talk about because it's such a visible element of SEO.

When in comes to links, what really matters in showing up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is the quality and relevancy of those links. A lot of folks in SEO circles refer to this as TrustRank (the original paper was written by Yahoo!, but the term is trademarked by Google), and what it means is that Google wants to see links to your website that are relevant to your spa.

What this means:

• Develop links with businesses and organizations with which you have a real relationship. Do more than just a link: add a paragraph to your website including the link. For example, describe the bed and breakfast down the street on your site, and ask them to do the same in return.
• Just ignore the vast majority of reciprocal link requests. Random reciprocal links won't help your search engine placement, and may actually hurt it.
• Connect with local websites and blogs. Serenity Gardens has a Hero's Week every year, which was picked up by popular Albuquerque blog, Duke City Fix.
• Send out releases whenever you've got something new to announce, for example, your great new Instant Gift Certificate capability. Then, send them using the free online services of a company like PRWeb, and make sure to include your website in the press release.

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A couple of guys at Stanford created a list of their favorite websites in "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1994. This turned into Yahoo in 1995, and gave us all a way to actually find stuff on the web. You had to get into the Yahoo directory if you wanted anyone to actually find your website. (This is back when search engine optimization was easy — get listed in Yahoo).

Next came the first wave of real search engines like WebCrawler, AltaVista, Infoseek and Hotbot — you could actually search the full-text of websites. It just didn't work that well for finding relevant information. If you wanted your website to turn up for a particular search, all you had to do was stuff your site with those keywords.

Go to 1997, where a couple of more guys from Stanford come up with a simple but brilliant idea: use the links between web pages to determine their relevancy. This was PageRank, and the birth of Google. Google produced more relevant results than the other search engines, and quickly become a rising star, turning that into real revenue with AdWords.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has never been the same.

In the tradition of Mel Brooks, there will be no Part II. But we are going to talk a lot about SEO and how it can help your spa.

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You've opened your brand-new spa and commissioned a beautifully designed website to go with it (hopefully a SpaBoom Dynamic Website). An obvious way for somebody to find out about your new business is to search on Google, maybe for "Albuquerque spa". There's only one problem: chances are very good that your brand-new website won't show up on the search pages, or will be buried so deep that no one will ever see it.

You're stuck in what many search engine experts are calling the Google sandbox. Your time in this Internet penalty box can last several months.

There's a simple explanation for this purgatory-on-earth: Google's goal is to return the most relevant results for searches. And they've decided that brand-new websites tend not to be the most relevant. It's part of the search engine's fight against "spam" websites. You've probably clicked on them after running a search: a website filled with junk surrounded by ads. Well, your brand-new website is caught right in the middle of this battle between Google and spam websites.

Note that we're not talking about a redesign of an existing website. Don't worry about updating the look of your existing site — you won't have this problem. This is only an issue for a brand-new website, or more accurately, a brand-new domain, e.g. "yourspa.com".

You only have one solution: wait it out. In the meantime, focus on the core marketing that will turn your website into a great asset for your spa:

• Include your website on every piece of printed material that you put out: your service menu, business cards, advertisements, etc.
• Direct clients to your website on your voice mail. Tell them they can buy Instant Gift Certificates and schedule appointments online. Consider custom hold "music" that includes your website.
• Ask relevant organizations and businesses to link to your site: the local Chamber of Commerce, the tourism department, the bed and breakfast down the street.
• Get listed in Discover Spas.
• Collect e-mail addresses on your new client forms and when you sell anything at retail. Then, put them in SpaBoom under Clients (we don't have e-mail marketing yet — but will soon!).
• Consider using Google AdWords to buy text ads for search terms that prospective clients are likely to use when looking for a spa. Yes, there is some serious irony here in paying Google for text ads to help compensate for Google penalizing you.

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