I've had three customers contact me this week to ask why they aren't first on Google so it prompted me to write a blog entry. The customers have had other people who are "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts" telling them they need some SEO work done on their sites.
Keywords and Adwords
The first case was a cutomer who was participating in a course about SEO and getting better results from Google. The tips he had were the Google does not like redirects and that he should have certain keywords in his title tag. We advised that Google doesn't really care about a single redirect to your main site, and proved that while the title tag is a good thing, the very words he wanted in the title tag yielded a worldwide #2 listing and top featured ad on Google. So the ranking was actually very good.
We'll add the text to his title tag, but speaking to another customer this week on the same topic they had some realted feedback. Both these customers are running AdWords on Google. One customer says he is using 47 keywords with AdWords, but it only clicked after talking to the second customer that they both may have a costly strategy that is not working so well. AdWords allows you to select key words and phrases, and selecting lots might give you the impression of casting a wide net. The problem is there are a lot of fish in that wide net that you probably don't want. Both these business operate in a retail bricks and mortar environment, so they want customers to come to their business, meaning they only want local customers.
These businesses should target their keywords and phrases so they include the regions and customers they want. Using one example I asked the second customer what keywords they used, and they listed generic ones like "massage therapy" however they did not have "massage therapy canberra", so I suggested they target their keywords and reduce the number of generic ones they are using. You need to think about what your customer is typing into Google so you don't waste money paying for clicks from people who will never be customers.
This brings me back to the first customer who was ranked #2, obviously he wants to be #1. Now we get into the wild world of search engine tricks. Some people up as many keyword filled pages as they can to attract hits even if the site offers nothing but links to other sites. Often they put up sites passing themselves off as a directory of sorts and either gaining revenue by placing ads or inviting people who are ranked lower to list on their page. The #1 rank on this search was inviting people to advertise, and the page content was totally irrelevant, however Google ranked it #1. If somebody else is out there with a site that Google believes is more important they will always rank above you. That said, this customer was not on the first page a few months back so he is doing the right thing as far as actually being on AdWords, which will increase your normal ranking as people click on you.
Flash
The final customer was asking about Flash on their website, they had been advised that it is hard to optimise a Flash site. This is true, but the site in question only had a Flash banner, the rest of the site was compliant and fairly well optimised so removing the Flash banner would have no effect at all. One issue with this site is that it has never been updated. If the customer logged into their content management system they would be able to optimise keywords within the text and insert outbound links, and add new conent, and search engines like frequently updated sites with fresh content.
Simple Strategies
SEO experts can talk all they like about keywords, inbound links, title tags and so forth, but if you don't update your site, Google will think less of you. Our own site can demostrate an example of both the issue of not updating and the issue of generic keywords being too common on the billions of websites out there that Google has in it's index.
Keep it fresh!
Lets look at updating first, and I'll use our brand "Custom Web Solutions" as the example. When we regsitered www.customwebsol.com we used the abbreviation because a Cybersquatter already owned the entire name customwebsolutions.com. On Google back then when it only had ten billion sites in the index, we did not even rank on the first page. The first reason was we were new and somebody established had the same company name on a Canadian domain customwebsolutions.ca. They were first rank for "Custom Web Solutions" but over the years their site did not change and they never posted new content. Over the same time we blogged and updated our sites, we did not do any other SEO. But by simply having a compliant updated site we now dominate "Custom Web Solutions" as a search phrase on Google, Yahoo and MSN along with our products PhatCMS and PhatCart. New content ranks highly on Google. That's great, but what if somebody doesn't know my business or product name?
Target your customer
That brings us to generic keywords, our product is a Content Management System, we build web sites, we offer hosting. We mention all of these on our site, but we would rarely come up in the results for any of them. The main reason is that much larger websites have these terms in them, big very high traffic websites also rank very highly on Google and if a site like Wikipedia has an article on Content Management Systems they will be first. We can look at Content Management System Canberra, Sydney or Australia to narrow it down, and then we would have to focus on putting those exact keywords on the site and into our content titles to compete with the many sites with those words. We could also run AdWords on those few target keywords to increase visibility and traffic, which also add to your rank in general results. At that point you have a look at what the others are doing to get their results. Is their title better than yours? Are they in the AdWords results?
Will we SEO?
Considering how competitive our market is, effective SEO targeting generic keywords about what we do that would actually bring us customers would be costly and time consuming. It doesn't mean we won't put efforts into this in future, and we already use some of the techniques described above fairly effectively. Our name and branding results are great and by having this if somebody hears in conversation or is told about us our our products they will find us at the top in the search engines. Suprprisingly MSN/Live search ranks us #1 for "custom content management system" however we're not even on the first page for that term on Yahoo and Google who are the more dominant players and it shows that they probably have more pages indexed than Live.
