Category: Search Engine Optimization

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How Do I Get in Google’s Top 10 Results?

Boy, that is the million dollar question isn’t it? How do I get in the top 10 Google.com search results? First, not every website realistically can get there. Sometimes the competition for the top spots is so fierce that a new website simply can’t break in.

This is particularly true with new small websites of under 10 pages in most business sectors. The key to garnering top organic placement, or at least improved organic search placement (that is placement you don’t pay for), is to create a plan and then work your plan.

These are the things that I know will help improve organic search placement:

  1. Make sure your content is original and is keyword dense but readable.
  2. Create a strategy to add new pages to your website every month.
  3. Get blogging on your domain. (ie www.yourdomain.com/blog not blog.yourdomain.com and certainly not on Blogspot or WordPress.com)
  4. Work on creating value for readers. Provide free information not just about your services. Give in-depth knowledge on topics and show your expertise.
  5. Make sure your home page is not all images or Flash. You’ve got to have content!

For some websites you have to work your plan to build web authority. Suddenly it seems that you hit a tipping point and start to get placement. In some cases you must lower your expectations and work to own smaller local markets before you move to the state and then national level if you can even move to a higher level.

Additionally, there are some markets that are really tough to own, take real estate for example. A five page website, no mater how pretty or optimized, will ever bump a national firm out of top Google placement. However that site may be able to place for city and county searches organically.

When it comes to moving up in the organic results, you have to take a long range view. You’ve got to be doing everything right over time to really see progress in your placement on the search engines.

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Sometimes SEO May Not Be Right For You

Sometimes SEO source code optimization of a website to improve organic search placement may not be the right choice for a project. In some cases content creation for the website, blog writing, and a focus on Google Placements (Google Maps) may be a better use of funds.

Organic code optimization of a website may sometimes run over $2,000 to $3,000 – and that’s for a relatively small website. When keyword research shows very little volume of searches on keyword targets and the client sells in a local geographic area, spending cash to optimize may simply not be a wise investment. Especially when the keyword targets in a very specific market don’t show statistically in the keyword research.

In this case, a program of content revision and creation with a focus on location additions, blogging with location targets, and work in Google Maps may actually generate the results the client really needs and be less expensive.

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Blogging Off-Domain Does It Work? Part III

Okay if you’ve read the posts this week, this is the solution if you can only blog off-site. First, based on our case study, we just don’t recommend blogging off-domain at this point. If you can only blog off-domain, I strongly recommend you evaluate organic placement for your off-domain blog separately. If your blog shows for your keyword on Google.com then I would consider continuing to blog off-domain and point links to your parent website. You may actually be able to place organically with your off-domain blog if you have been blogging for a while and you are not in a competitive industry.

If your off-domain blog does not place organically for your keywords then I would stop all blogging efforts there. I would instead take the money and time that I had invested in blogging and use it to start building on-site on-domain content. That content might be in the form of

  • free downloadable white papers
  • feature articles
  • monthly press releases
  • online newsletters
  • additional website pages

You can do double duty with some of these types of items by disseminating them on Google Knol, American Chronicle, GoArticles, and article syndication sites in order to get inbound links.

I would strongly recommend that you review your current off-domain blogging approach as all blogging is not equal. Blogging is really only a good, rather a great SEO strategy for you when you are blogging on-domain. If you just can’t blog on-domain, I would use the time and dollars to build parent website content and value instead of spending that on off-domain blogging at this time.

If you need on-domain blog writing, remember we are the blog experts in the industry. We invite you to visit our blog writing services page for information on pricing and to review writing samples.

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Blogging-Off Domain Does It Work? Part II

If your blog cannot be built on-domain what should you do? There are some situations where you just cannot build an on-domain blog. Some situations may be where you are using a template driven website and you really do not have your own server space and so cannot install WordPress, you have an e-commerce site and just cannot include the technology to run a blog on the server, or you are hosted on a Windows server and cannot install PHP which is needed for WordPress.

If you have any of these scenarios, isn’t off-domain blogging still good for you? I used to say yes, but let’s look at a case study done recently for a real estate firm.

This client could not install an on-domain blog as their website was a template driven website and they did not have “real” server space. We set up a GoDaddy.com domain and hosting to house their off-domain WordPress blog. We blogged for almost six month using keyword dense phrases. At the end of the study period, we evaluated. Did the off-domain blog bump up the parent domain due to one way inbound links and keyword dense blog posts pointing to their parent domain?

What we found was that the strategy of off-site blogging was not workable. The parent domain got no “SEO juice” from our blogging efforts. Not only did organic placement not improve, but the off-domain blog itself was not showing for the keywords we were using either.

You can run some searches yourself on this website yourself to see that we started out no where and ended up no where. The parent domain is www.MarcoIslandLuxuryEstates.com and the blogsite is www.Marco-Island-Luxury-Estates.com. If you look, you will see that the blog domain is not in the top 100 results. The parent website has been slowly moving up in the SERPs but when analysis is done on links to the parent domain, Google is not recording the links from the blog as a factor.

The key take away from this post is that unless you heavily promote and create a link strategy for your off-domain blog to build it up in Google, the site has no “authority” on Google and the other search engines and so one way inbound links from the off-domain blog to the parent website mean nothing to Google in regards to organic placement.

If you are going to invest time and money to promote, create links and push placement for an off-domain blog in order to help the parent domain, wouldn’t the investment and time be much better spent on the parent domain instead?

Make sure to read my recommendations on Friday on what you should do instead of having an off-domain blog.