When Field Service Management set up as the sole UK supplier of Metrix Software, they wanted a simple site which was easy to navigate and easy to maintain, and, as importantly, easy for the search engines to index. They gave Babel Interactive this brief; and the following article details the search engine submission tactics used and the effects of having a keyword-sensitive domain name.

Field Service Management (www.FieldServiceManagement.co.uk) is a new company that appreciated the importance of optimising their site in order to get good search engine visibility. After constructing a simple site that was designed with ease of navigation in mind, it was necessary first to submit them to the main directories and to put together an initial link-building exercise from existing sites that would allow the search engine spiders to follow these links and to index Field Service Management accordingly.

Within two weeks Field Service Management was on the first page of MSN.co.uk under that search term, although they had yet to be cached by Google and Yahoo. ‘This’, remarks Babel’s Marketing Manager Tom Church, ‘is not unusual: MSN is one of the quickest at picking up new sites, and we have seen examples of this time and again. Rumours abound in the Online Marketing industry of Google’s feared ‘Sandbox ‘effect, where new sites are essentially quarantined until the search engine is satisfied that they are valid sites rather than vehicles for spamming. I am personally not convinced of this, but there is no doubt Google can sometimes be tricky in getting a new site indexed. The best thing to do is to commit yourself to good practice: build decent quality incoming links, perfect the copy on your site, and get Google’s attention by submitting a site map.’

Although paid search engine placements can speed up the inclusion of a site into the directories, such a tactic wasn’t used for the Field Service Management site. ‘We used the Open Directory and free indexes in this case’ stated Church, ‘for we were confident that the content and the URL of Field Service Management would give it a great advantage in being picked up. Bear in mind we didn’t use meta tags in the initial stages of the design – and still, after only two weeks, it has reached the first page of MSN.co.uk. This fact alone confirms what many still debate: the relevance of keyword placements in the URL. There is no doubt that if someone searches for ‘field service management’ and your site is entitled www.fieldservicemanagement.co.uk then you are likely to gain an advantage. How much of an advantage depends upon the other major determinants of optimisation such as links, page rank, and content, and also upon the competition of your specific industry in the online arena.’

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