• by Mike Levin , April 9, 2007

This week, anyone with a stake in online business is asking themselves some simple questions about Google.

A recent cover story in BusinessWeek explores the deep resentment felt by many customers and former partners of the search giant. An April 4 column in Online Media Daily reports on the new Website Optimizer tool. It turns out to be a landing-page tester, useful once a visitor has already found the site.

This is an absolutely valid tool, because no amount of traffic is going to help, if your site is broken. The problem is that Google is hijacking the terminology of a distinctly different discipline wherein Web site optimization means driving traffic to a site in the first place. What Google's doing is called mutivariate testing, or A/B switching. Regardless, they named the product Website Optimizer.

We're left to wonder: Is Google naïveorarrogant? Maybe both?

Google's use of the term "optimizer" is technically accurate, but it is being applied in the way commonly done in the marketing community. In marketing circles, Web site optimization typically refers to the process of making sites naturally position well in Google.This practice, it is worth noting, doesn't make Google any money.

The message appears to be that Google is equipping you with all the tools they believe are necessary for a successful online business, i.e. the "three legs" of successful online marketing: AdWords, Google Analytics, and now Website Optimizer to help test alternative pages, until zeroing in on the most effective possible ones for yielding conversions.

Here's the problem:Using the might of Google's leadership position in search to label "Web site optimization" as an AdWords landing page tester, Google ensures that users remain dependent on AdWords to drive traffic to their site in the first place. This makes any outside SEO suddenly seem unnecessary

Without optimizing a site for search engines, you have little control over the initial visit traffic, aside from advertising with AdWords. There are a few tools to do this, and some good advice, on a Google site called Webmaster Central, but it falls short of providing actual tools to see whether you're accurately following their advice.

The good news is that there are some third party tools out there that can help, and many of them are free. Some of them will analyze your site, revealing technical details that are helping or harming your search standings. Some tools rely on the inherently well optimized nature of blogging software and other content management systems, focusing instead on establishing new traffic attractors in the form of new pages based on addressing new subject-matter not previously featured on your site.

Still other tools can identify the exact keywords driving traffic to a site, allowing users to only buy those specific terms from AdWords.By doing this, advertisers can potentially save millions and, in turn, it is a major source of frustration for Google.

This is what Web site optimization means to the thousands of people in the industry today. Labeling a multivariate testing product with terms having much broader implication has many of us scratching our heads, asking whether this is innocent product naming, or indicative of the larger walled garden scenario that has so many in the industry worried.

Site optimization done correctly leaves the balance of power (in terms of content, traffic and revenue) in the hands of even the smallest site publisher or online business.

Web site optimization is about living outside the walled gardens, taking steps to ensure a Web site's health, and the ability to attract customers far into the future, and independent of any particular advertising campaign product.

Mike Levin is the Vice President Interactive at the New York-based strategic communications agency, Connors Communications and is the creator of HitTail, the content intelligence product which reveals in real-time the keyword suggestions that naturally drive traffic to your Web site.