Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The Right Content for the Right People
SEO isn't about traffic quantity, it's about traffic quality. It's about getting the best qualified traffic by ranking for the right things.
It's not WHAT you sell but WHO you are selling to
Take the keywords "running shoes" for example. What comes to mind? Nike? Adidas? Asics? New Balance? Yet none of these large manufacturers show up within the first 100 SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). While all of these companies manufacture sportswear, their running shoe divisions are large enough to warrant top rankings in Google.
Using tools freely available on the Internet, it is possible to analyze Nike's website to determine what keywords are used on various pages and domains. Surprisingly, the word "shox" is used extensively for content related to running shoes. The reason? Shox is the trademark of technology developed by Nike used in their running shoes. Shox are small hollow columns that make up the midsole of the shoe.
In spite of the fact that this technology has been on the market for over 20 years and Nike originated the word, the keyword "shox" goes to the domain shox.com, a company located in California that claims on their homepage to be "... the internet's number one source for name brand, high-performance shocks and automotive suspension products; shock absorbers, suspension kits, lowering kits, sway bars, struts, springs, coil-over kits and overall performance suspension specialty items." With a ranking of #1 out of 17 million SERPs, there obviously must be some truth to that. At the time of this writing, Nike was within the top 50.
The web developers for Nike are no doubt highly skilled at creating SEO websites. Yet the question begs as to why the keywords "running shoes" doesn't place them at #1 given their huge website and worldwide market presence. After all, how many people are going to type in the keyword "shox" when looking for running shoes? And how many people are going to use the keyword "shox" when looking for automotive shocks? Yet the keywords "automotive shock absorbers" puts shox.com within the top 10 even though the number of SERPs is reduced to around 1,300,000. Taken together, the two queries, one with "shox" and the other with "automotive shock absorbers", clearly indicates shox.com has such a powerful Internet presence that their very own domain name beats the trademark "shox" that is associated with Nike.
What is even more revealing is that the "About Us" page on shox.com claims to be in business since 1982, and claims to be known as "RD Enterprises", yet there are no results other than shox.com when you google for "RD Enterprises". The World Wide Web only started to take off in the mid 90s, so "RD Enterprises" should have been a well established name long before this. Though they claim to be a "major warehouse distributor", for all you know, it could be a loner running an operation out of his bedroom with no real warehouses or employees. The truth is, is that there are literally hundreds of thousands of individuals operating businesses from their homes and are formidable competitors to the likes of huge businesses like Nike.
Not surprising, the #1 position for "running shoes" is www.runningshoes.com - a company that sells various brands of running shoes - and they don't even sell Nike!
While Nike no doubt has the capability and resources needed to have their domain show up in position #1 for the keywords "running shoes", it is quite obvious that they have deliberately chosen a different tactic and different keywords to target the audience that they really are after. Anyone who has done any serious amount of running tends to pay attention to the design of running shoes, especially if they run 10 to 15 km per day. While Nike does manufacture low end running shoes, they are generally known for their innovation and producing high quality shoes for serious runners. As such, Nike's target audience really is geared towards runners. Examining several of their webpages reveals that indeed the keywords they have chosen are "running", "runners" and "run". The keyword "running" currently lists 573 million SERPs and Nike appears within the top 50. To target a high ranking with a single keyword like "running" given that this word
is used in countless contexts that have nothing to do with the sport of running, is an unbelievable feat to achieve.
What one learns from this is that you don't select keywords based upon what you are selling but rather to who you are selling. Common sense might suggest that because you manufacture running shoes, the keywords "running shoes" should be the keywords you optimize your site for. The truth however is that "runners" look for running shoes and everything that has to do with running including race events, diets and training. While Nike could have far more easily have captured the top position for the keywords "running shoes" if they had so chosen (with a limit of 10 million SERPs), they chose instead to encompass the greater sphere of running and successfully managed to reach the top 50 for the keyword "running" that generates almost 60 times more SERPs than for the keywords "running shoes".
One of the key elements to succeeding in SEO is to have either a small number of high quality incoming links to your site or hundreds or thousands of links from low ranking sites. By targeting the "running" keyword, many low ranking websites that center around running (and there are thousands of them) will have links to nike.com because while Nike is primarily a manufacturer of sportswear, they have built up a substantial community around the sport of running with far more useful content to runners than just information about their running shoes.
Data Mining & Free Web Services
Any company embarking on attempting to raise their ranking in Google to a high level must realize that for their site to succeed, it must contain a lot of content that acts as supporting content to your main line of business. While the occassional visitor will visit your site to get product information, the vast majority of visitors are looking for a lot more useful information than just about the product. They want solutions, tips, free services, blogs, forums, lots of great pictures and videos. Developing such content is a long term endeavor and requires dedication. It generally takes several years and a lot of hard work to reach that kind of level.
Anyone can research the Internet for all the rules of Do's and Dont's on how to optimize your website to get a better ranking in Google. It is a tedious task but not difficult. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of companies out there who can claim to get you to the top 10 using their "expertise" and "inside secrets". Few of these however have any real experience in what it takes to create sites that contain useful content. While it is possible to increase your ranking by implementing well-known SEO parameters, they tend to be transient. Google can change them at any time and suddenly without notice, your site drops to a much lower rank or disappears altogether. Developers at Google are not just software engineers. Many are language specialists, psychologists and behavioral analysts. They constantly research how people interact with data, interpret it and how humans are capable of sorting out useful content from worthless information. Translating this research into real code that a search engine can implement is a very tricky task and highly secretive. In any case, Google's engineers are increasingly relying less and less on page symantics and relying increasingly more on the content itself to determine a page's worthiness. They still have a long way to go to eliminate many sites that appear high in ranking when they really shouldn't and those at low rankings that should appear higher. Real SEO experts, like Mobilgistix, take data mining into considerable evaluation when attempting to improve a site's ranking.
At Mobilgistix, we never claim nor guranatee that you will get listed among the top 10. Nobody can. What we do offer though is talented experience in data mining and finding out who you need to be targeting and what changes need to be made to your website for it to be addressing the correct audience. You still need to generate lots of correct content. If generating lots of content is not an option for the short term, there are alternative approaches such as offering a valuable free service on your website that users will come back to and recommend to others. A free web service that offers something useful will usually result in a lot of incoming links from even high ranking websites. The time and cost to develop a free web service is often far cheaper and faster than generating a lot of useful content.
If you need to optimize your site to get a higher ranking in Google, not only can Mobilgistix provide all of the know-how on the low end technical issues that your site needs to deal with but we offer much experience in data mining, determining your true market audience and creating a framework that your site must center around in order to achieve the ranking you are after. We will even examine your line of business and determine what potential free web service could be provided to your visitors that makes visiting your site worthwhile. At Mobilgistix, we believe that offering some form of a free web service to your visitors is a crucial part of your website's success. Every major website offers some form of free service. Developing a free web service need not be expensive. If you are on a tight budget, we may even consider developing such a web service at a significantly reduced cost and receive reimbursement by hosting the service on our own site for a temporary period or possibly through advertisement revenues on your own site.
Contact us on how we can help to boost your site to a level that will generate more visitors and ultimately lead to higher revenues.
Sean Belnick - From Bedroom Website to Millionaire
Finally, take the keywords "office chairs". The domain bizchair.com is one ot the top ranking sites that has to do with office chairs and office furniture. It was about 8 years ago that Sean Belnick, a high school student at the time, locked himself in his bedroom for three days to develop his website. He was 14 at the time. He initially sold only a few models of office chairs. Five years later while a student studying business, he was managing his business in his spare time. With around 40 employees and warehouses full of office furniture, his business grew to the point that his website appears within the top 10 in 8 million SERPs. An examination of bizchairs.com reveals that the webiste is search engine optimized and contains thousands of pages of content. The moral of this story? It doesn't matter how big a business you are. It's all about providing an abundance of right content to the right people and of course selling your product at the lowest price possible. See the video below on Sean Belnick's story.
Last Updated: 08 June 2008