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Springfield Union News
"Searchers, rev up your engines"
Staff Writer, William Freebairn
Staff Photos by David Monlar

HADLEY   - The way Rob M. Laporte sees it, what use is having a Web site if no one can find it?

His 5-year-old search engine optimization company, DISC, specializes in tweaking Web sites so they turn up more frequently in commonly used Internet search engines.

Optimizing sites for more frequent and better search-engine results translates into a growing audience and better sales, Laporte said. "If you're in these search engines, you'll make money."

Instead of focusing on snazzy layouts or elaborate animation, DISC applies a rigorous analysis of a company's business and the terms used by customers looking for their type of products.

The priority in its redesigns is usually to make a Web site emerge more frequently in the search-engine queries of potential customers.

To do this, DISC  analyzes the most frequent terms and words associated with the product and seeks to include them frequently in key areas of the Web site, both areas that are visible to users and those that are embedded in code. Automated programs that index the Web for major search engines give more weight to words used in some parts of a site than in other parts.

For example, the highest weighting in a search goes to the title that appears at the top of the browser's window. Without making it nonsensical,  Laporte seeks to include key words in the title.

Another key is the description submitted by a business to some human-edited search-engine companies to describe a site, Laporte said.

"The 20 most important words of Web marketing are the 20 words you submit to describe your business to Yahoo!"

Increasingly, the automated and human reviewers at search engines do not even look at much of a site, Laporte said. Complicated layouts can make it even less likely that the search engines will index a full page, Laporte said.

"You want to make it easier for the search engines to find you. "

Laporte is fairly blunt about the value he offers people for their Web sites. "My sites make money," he said flatly.

Within three years, he said, any money you spend on a Web site or site redesign should come back in increased sales. "Otherwise, why are you  doing it?"

While optimization is accepted in the business, search engines frown on  deliberate misdirection in sites.

Some Web-site designers used to embed secret text in a site to lure search engines. The text would appear in the same color as the site's background, meaning users could not see it, but automatic programs analyzing the computer code would read and index the words.

"That will get you kicked out of a search engine today," Laporte said.

Other tricks include an entire page of text, containing terms intended to draw search-engines, that disappears in the blink of an eye. The user doesn't even see the page, which is replaced almost instantly by the true Web site, but automated systems will read only the initial page.

Laporte started the company in 1995 as the Document Imaging and Scanning Co. While he was a graduate student in English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Laporte scanned documents into computers for use by lawyers and businesses.

He became interested in the Internet at about that time and helped build the English department's first Web page.

Financed initially by running up his credit card debt, Laporte said the search engine optimization company now has 10 full- and part-time employees and revenues of more than $200,000 this year. Laporte said he expects that figure to grow next year.

He has worked for Barnes & Noble, Hardigg Industries in Deerfield and other firms. DISC charges from $3500 for a site and up, although the average is around $12,000.

Web design is getting more complicated as it increasingly moves into more complex areas such as integration with elaborate business-wide software systems, contact management and customer service programs. "It's getting very tough to simply design a Web site," Laporte said.

Although much has been said about the value of television and billboard advertisements driving traffic to Web sites, the main way that people reach sites is by typing an inquiry into one of the many search engines that index the Web, Laporte said." I used to think that the search engines would become less important than other methods, but I was surprised to find that doesn't seem to have happened."

Advertising and search-engine optimization are complementary, Laporte tells clients.

There are, of course, other issues in designing a Web site. It must download quickly or people will lose patience, Laporte said. A site should be attractive and intuitive to navigate, as well.

In a sense, optimizing a Web site for search engines is just about concise, accurate description."

Good writers just naturally use words that will be pertinent to the user," Laporte said.

Hampshire Gazette
"Linguistics a key to getting people to your Web site"
By JUDSON BROWN, Staff Writer
Monday, December 18, 2000 - Hadley

 Because the World Wide Web is a visual medium, many people tend to forget that written language is really what makes it tick, and that good writing is the key to success in using it, says Rob Laporte, the owner of a local Web development company that promotes as its house specialty "search engine optimization."

A trend toward fancier and fancier multi-media applications on the Web may disguise the basic unaltered fact, Laporte says, that "the Web itself is completely connected by words, and the whole trick for using it is linguistic."

What determines more than anything else whether a Web site will be found by those for whom it was intended, says Laporte, is the quality of the writing on a Web site - particularly the vocabulary used to describe it.

A special kind of writing done in his shop follows both the rules of English grammar and the intricate logic of Web search engines. Laporte calls it "the infrastructure of being found."

Sporting a neatly trimmed beard and dressed in a slightly rumpled gray flannel suit, Laporte tilts back in his swivel wingback chair behind an antique tin-topped work table in the middle of a bedroom in an historic brick house at 123 Bay Road. A two-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is perched on top of an old metal filing cabinet behind him.

Laporte has a master's degree and an ABD (all but dissertation) in English literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he also taught.

He had put together a dissertation prospectus on the Elizabethan honor code as a major theme in Shakespeare's plays and was headed for a career in academia when he discovered there was a dearth of professorships to be had, and he detoured into a career in marketing.

He eventually went off on his own and started DISC (an acronym for Document Imaging and Scanning Company), now a full-service Internet design and search engine optimization company, 6 years ago.

The company is doing about $300,000 in annual sales and employs eight, half of them full-time, half part-time, and several who work out of their homes, telecommuting. They include three programmers, a couple of Web analysts/copywriters and a graphic designer.

There are many factors that determine the overall quality of a Web site, Laporte says, including overall appearance, ease of navigation, and how quickly the material downloads. But transcending these, especially for his business customers - many of whom are looking, he says, for return on investment (ROI) within a year or two - is the basic issue of getting people to arrive at the site to begin with. And not just any people, he adds, but the right ones - "good prospects," potential buying customers.

DISC's clients in the area include, among others, Hannoush Jewelers, Fly by Night Futon furniture store in Northampton, R. Michelson Galleries, Kleen-Bore Inc. in Easthampton, GBI Marketing in Bernardston and Hardigg Industries in South Deerfield.

Search engine optimization is a growing discipline within the Web marketing and development arena about which Laporte has made himself an expert, devoting scores of "unbillable hours" to doing research to keep himself up to date with fast-changing developments in the field. Some of his customers found him through free seminars he's given in the area.

Search engine optimization is the scientific-sounding term for a collection of linguistic and statistical tactics for getting any particular Web site placed high up on any list of sites that any of the major search engines - there are about 15 majors - will deliver to the screen in response to a particular query.

Search engines are huge indexes of thousands of Web sites. Most are scanned by electronic "robots" or "spiders" that select out the addresses (called URLs) of individual Web sites in response to an individual's query. The user initiates the query by typing in "keywords" or selecting a subject category from a given menu of options. The engines deliver their selections usually in a ranked order on the users' screen, usually with remarkable speed.

Search engines are not the only means by which people find Web sites. Word of mouth, traditional media advertising, banner ads on Web sites, e-mail "signatures," and links from other Web sites are other ways. But Laporte cites various studies, including one done at the Georgia Institute of Technology, that show that search engines and links are the two most frequently used methods.

DISC strives to get its clients' Web sites listed "in the top 10 positions for two or three terms on two thirds of the search engines," says Laporte.

After the 10th entry or the first page, there tends to be rapid drop off of users, who are notoriously short on patience, having come, rightly or wrongly, to expect instant results from their queries on the Internet.

DISC does not guarantee these results, but the company does offer its customers tools by which to measure actual results. The firm sells "server statistics software" that produces charts and graphs detailing from which search engines visitors have come to their site, by what keywords, or from what links, affiliates or banner ads.

"This is a numbers game," says Laporte with unacademic emphasis, "with measurable, provable results. It's not smoke and mirrors."

He describes search engine optimization as a demanding discipline that requires equal parts linguistic and statistical savvy. The two perspectives are in fact inextricable in the actual work.

"Good writing matters," says Laporte, because it has everything to do with determining the position of a Web page in any list of entries delivered by a search engine.

He defines good writing as "using words that ring bells in readers' minds."

"To the extent that the writing contains a rich array of words that is relevant to the reader" - or the Web surfer in this case - "it's good writing," whether for the Web, or for any other medium, he says.

The "unique challenge" of writing for search engine optimization, he adds, "is that you want to do all the things you do in good writing (while taking into account) a statistical, linguistic grid beneath the language."

The grid is derived from studies of search engine algorithms which provide a guide for how frequently keywords should be repeated and how they should be positioned and distributed over the entire page for optimum results.

The process begins with "harvesting keywords" and key phrases from the client business or organization in order to come up with a select list of those terms that most precisely pertain to the particulars of the client's mission, products and services. For example, in the case of Kleen-Bore, which develops gun care products, these words include, in order of prominence, gun, cleaning, bore, kleen, kits, accessories, care, rifle, hunting and supplies.

Once the "universe of keywords" has been established, then copywriting, or what he referred to at one point as the "implementing of the words," begins.

The challenge in writing Web page copy that will attract good prospects - and keep them glued there - is to balance what DISC's copywriter and analyst Mark Baven terms clear, terse, "no-nonsense" prose with the requirement to place and repeat the keywords in accordance with the pre-determined formula.

Too much repetition of keywords not only will drive away information-hungry readers who generally have little patience with unproductive verbiage, but it also can get the Web site kicked out of most search engines who do not tolerate manipulative techniques to attract visitors to a site, according to Baven and Laporte.

Interviews with several of DISC's customers seem to suggest they are happy with the results they have gotten from Laporte's application of his search engine tactics to their sites.

The owner and founder of Kleen-Bore, Paul Judd, said having DISC upgrade his Web site has resulted in more hits and a growing number of retail sales, even though Web-generated sales still comprise only about one percent of total sales for the company which is primarily a wholesaler working through a network of distributors.

His Web position report indicates the Kleen-Bore site is grabbing top ten positions for quite a few key words in quite a few search engines, Judd said, and this means he's getting a lot of good "exposure" through the Web site, which is a major goal at present.

"Being on that first page is key," he says.

The upgrade has been expensive - "in the five figures" so far - he said, and he anticipates he will be spending quite a bit more as he contemplates improving the shopping function, adding an on-line catalogue, making the site more "interactive," and eventually transacting more of his business with his dealers on-line.

The expenses are daunting, said Judd, and he anticipates it will be a few years yet before he sees his ROI, but the Web "is the place to be," he believes. "It's where our future is."

At GBI Marketing in Bernardston, executive vice president Shane Hammond said the company's "Internet traffic" has nearly tripled as a result of the application of search engine tactics by DISC staff, and the investment already has paid for itself.

The marketing and media coordinator at Hardigg, Anne Heaslip, said her company also has seen an increase in traffic on its Web site as result of DISC's work. The company previously had a site that was "flashy" but not very productive, she says. The renovated site is generating "traffic."

"They learned our business quickly," she says of DISC, and that seemed to have paid off.

Illuminating
Spring 2002

Rob Laporte (B.A., 1985; M.A., 1994) was a Ph.D. student specializing in Renaissance literature when he first got interested in the Web. This was in 1994, long before the recent bubble burst in dot.com land, and Laporte began to think he could apply his literary skills to search engine marketing.

"It became clear to me that the Web is completely connected by words, and that the whole trick for being found is matching the language searchers use with the language in Web sites," Laporte says.

With that very humanities-esque thought in mind, Laporte began designing a few Web sites with word content that would easily be discovered by Web suffers. It soon became apparent that his efforts were paying off, and in 1995 he went into business full-time, abandoning his studies when he was A.B.D. (All But Dissertation) to create the Document Imaging & Scanning Company (DISC).

Today, DISC employs a staff of ten and brings in an average of $300,000 a year. Even more surprising, it has not only survived the recent bubble burst, it is flourishing on a grander scale, attracting more customers all the time.

"I really think my training in English had a profound effect on my success in this venture," Laporte says. "While my undergraduate concentration in marketing and later experience in the field contributed greatly, it was my understanding of language that created a solid base for DISC."

Then pausing and rubbing his beard, Laporte leans back like the perfect Shakespearean scholar and adds, "Or to put it otherwise, good writers just naturally use words that will be pertinent to the user - and there is perhaps no greater writer for showing you how to do this than Shakespeare."

For more information on the search engine optimization company, contact DISC.