I'm going to freely reveal our "secret" and it's what most SEM (Search Engine Marketing) companies do not want you to know, it's precisely what successful Search Engine Marketing companies do. The trick is, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies do not address the most critical factor in how search engines rank your site above another for competitive search terms. They don't know marketing, they just know code. The code in the pages of the website does matter, it can't be written badly, the search engines need to be able to read the meta data properly, the title tag, the content etc. But will clean code beat your competitor? Not if they are clean too. When the SEO company you outsourced your campaign to promised to get your site listed in the major search engines, they likely either didn't provide the precise search terms, or they provided you with a list of phrases that all included your company name. Branding is good, but what other website is trying to show up for your company name. It's not a competitive term, your site will likely have the exact characters that make up your company name already in the actual URL, often that alone is enough, especially when that phrase "BRANDX" is not completive (no other sites are trying to rank for it, and relatively few people on the internet are searching for it). We all know that someone out there is searching for what your company does, and those are the terms that only SEM can deliver, SEO alone has no chance.
Two Sites, both have the exact same attributes (same title tag, content keyword density, meta-tags, etc.). All things being equal, two sites have the exact same strengths as each other, how do the search engines determine who ranks above the other. We know they do, they select one site above another all the time, and with any "luck" your site is selected. We'll if you have a little "marketing" behind your site you can be sure it'll beat sites with equal or even those with less on-page attributes. We have found that often, the number one site for a competitive term has NO proper SEO techniques deployed. Why do they win? Well, that is precisely why SEM is taking huge leaps forward, and why marketing dollars from all the top corporations in America are pouring into SEM.
Please understand this: The search engines do not trust what you say your site is about!
They can't trust you when you say your site is about furniture. They have been burned in the past. The search engines don't want you to stop using them, the last thing they want is for you to go to their competitor. To do this they ensure that every time you search you find something that truly is about what you searched for, not about something that says it's about furniture but ends up being about doll furniture. If you wanted "doll furniture" you would have added the word "doll", so if a doll furniture site works hard on their SEO efforts to make it appear to the search engines as if they are about "furniture" in general, the search engines would slowly lose market share to their competitors as each search for furniture delivers a site that is not as closely related to furniture as another. They don't trust you when you say you are about furniture, so what do you do. What do the search engines do to determine what your site is really about.
HOW:
They call your references and ask them what you are about. Why is that so hard to believe, don't you call references before you allow someone to rent your home, or before you hire them? Before they hire you don't they call your references? So do the big search engines, in their own way.
Concept:
It's the same concept as a college thesis. If two people (Let's say you and your worse enemy) write a paper about the same thing "atomic theory", they get the same grade, over time one will appear more "popular" about a specific subject than another. As more and more students over the years write their papers, they will refer to previously written papers. If 10 students have your paper in their reference section, and 5 students refer to your nemesis, yours will be more popular. But the other may still be considered more about the subject than the other. For example, when referring to your paper three of them say "atomic expansion", while all five of the others refer to it as "atomic theory", what does this tell us. Time will tell they say. And time said that the great part of your thesis was about expansion, even if you only wrote that phrase in your paper one time, something you did made future students refer to your paper as they explained "expansion".
What does this mean:
When other sites refer to your site, we have to consider several factors.
1) How many other sites refer to your site (how many sites link to you).
2) How do they refer to your site (what does the anchor text say, does it say "atomic expansion" or "atomic theory").
3) What are those sites about (are they sites about "atomic expansion" or "theory")
Combination and timing:
With the right combination of links, anchor text, related sites linking to you, and on-page attributes you can tell the story to the search engines so that they believe what you say your site is about.
We have often found sites showing up in the top three positions for phrases that are not optimized on the site at all. They get all their rankings from links alone.
The competitor may have 500 links, only 50 of those links are from sites related to the phrase, 25 of those have the target phrase in the anchor text. You would target 25 related sites and ensure all of those have your target phrase in them.
How long your links stay up is a factor, if they stay up for 4 months then you are in good shape, but if in that time your competitor gets 50 more you'll be discouraged. Keep your eye on them, and their links. The links you get have to be on sites that are indexed by the top search engines, otherwise they'll never find your link. The popularity of the page your link appears on is also a factor. If your competitors are ahead of you when you start, and they are aggressive enough you may never catch them, we have never found this to be the case. Mostly because our efforts are focused, while the competitors are typically not as aware of the strength of their links. We usually catch them by surprise and leave them in the dust. However theoretically if they continue to grow at a rate that is faster then you can afford you may be fighting an uphill battle. This is what we do to them, making it cost too much for them to compete, leaving them no choice but to spend their marketing dollars in other ways (nice try competitor, try TV instead). We love to see our customers competitors run TV commercials, we know it's our efforts that made them spend those funds.
Your site can show up for any term so long as your site has more focused powerful references. Optimizing your site is nowhere near as important as your link efforts.
Obviously it's not as simple as obtaining a lot of links. But if you keep links in mind during your search engine ranking campaigns, you will have far more success period. |
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