Analyzing Real-Life Examples of Top Ranking Sites (page
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by Robin R. Nobles (page
1, page 2, page
3)
Have you ever wondered how top ranking sites are spending their advertising
dollars? Do they advertise offline? Do they outsource their SE positioning
work, or do they optimize their own sites in-house? What are they doing
to increase the visibility and popularity of their sites?
For this article, I chose two highly competitive keyphrases and one moderately
competitive keyword and then contacted three companies who are having
success in getting their sites ranked at or near the top and asked them
a series of questions.
The two competitive keyphrases:
homes for sale
used cars
The moderately competitive keyword:
shortwave -- (as in shortwave radios)
Of course the examples used in this article reflect the positioning of
these sites at the time of writing. Naturally they are bound to fluctuate
up and down in the listings. Even so, you'll likely find them placed closely
to where their positioning is described below. And, regardless of where
they're positioned at the time you happen to read this article, the examples
and the analysis remain strategically valid.
----------------------------------------------------
Keyword phrase: homes for sale
Site: HarmonHomes.com
HarmonHomes.com boasts the following top 10 rankings for the keyword
phrase, homes for sale:
#1 in AltaVista
#3 in Google
#4 in Fast/All the Web
#7 in Lycos
#3 in Yahoo! Web Pages
#4 in pure Inktomi results (http://169.207.238.189/search/)
It's important to note that HarmonHomes.com is owned by Trader Publishing
Company out of Norfolk, Virginia, which also owns several other large
Web sites, such as CareerWeb.com, ForRent.com, Parenthood.com, and Roomsaver.com.
Erin Cullipher, Marketing Manager of HarmonHomes.com, gave a quick summary
of the site:
Headquartered in Virginia Beach, Va., HarmonHomes.com is a leading provider
of online real estate classified ads. As a division of Trader Publishing
Company and part of the family of Trader Web sites, HarmonHomes.com provides
a comprehensive homes-for-sale database for home buyers while serving
as a convenient and effective advertising forum for real estate professionals.
According to Erin, Trader has a complete Web development team that is
responsible for each of their domains, with the exception of Roomsaver.
It's also important to note that the main page of HarmonHomes.com is
a straight HTML page. However, most of the interior pages, since they
are a classified ad site, are database delivered.
Erin answered the following interview questions:
Question: Do you do anything special to boost your site's
link popularity?
Erin: We are lucky to have a strong, built-in system
of links due to our company's network of highly trafficked sites. We have
links to HarmonHomes.com on all sites within the network and we, in return,
link to all of them as well. In addition, we have agreements with two
companies who provide Web sites for real estate agents. To offer a national
real estate listings database to the mostly local visitors to these agents'
sites, our link is typically placed under a "Search Homes Nationally"
button. In addition, we are pursuing a links page and reciprocal links
program with businesses affiliated with residential real estate.
Question: How do you spend your advertising dollars
for your Web site?
Erin: Our online business is somewhat unique in that
we have two target markets: we sell our advertising products to real estate
professionals in order to serve home buyers. So, while we market our products
to agents, we also have to drive consumer traffic to the site to satisfy
our agent clients and further build our business. As far as our trade
advertising efforts, we concentrate our dollars and efforts in the following
areas: trade shows, email marketing, print ads, direct mail and online
ads. To attract consumers to the site, we concentrate on the following
areas: SEO, home show sponsorships and email marketing. To reach both
of these markets, we also place our URL on the front cover of every issue
of Harmon Homes magazine (78 million issues annually) and advertise the
site in the publication. We also conduct intensive media efforts nationally.
Both of these initiatives are high impact and relatively low cost, if
not free.
Question: Do you purchase keywords from the pay engines
like Overture? If so, approximately how much do you spend each month on
Overture advertising?
Erin: Yes, we feel that pay engines are integral to
our SEO efforts, especially here in the beginning when we're trying to
establish a strong Web presence. We do have an account with Overture.
We spend less than $300 on Overture and other PFP engines.
Question: How much actual search engine optimization
work do you do on the site?
Erin: Optimization is done on an almost daily basis.
In order to serve our customers, the site changes daily. Being graphically
heavy and with most of our pages being dynamically generated, we have
worked to increase the amount of text on our pages. We have paid special
attention to relevancy factors by maximizing keywords and phrases.
Question: Are you using cloaking technology on your
site?
Erin: No, we do not use any cloaking technology. Our
pages are submitted to search engines manually with no doorway pages,
agent name or IP delivery.
Question: Do you hire a professional SEO or outsource
your SEO work, or do you do the search engine work yourself?
Erin: We have a full-time Web Promotions Specialist
who handles SEO for HarmonHomes.com, in addition to three other Trader-owned
sites. She has a Web development background and conducts extensive research
on SEO topics. Even with a full-time person allocated to these efforts
and significant strides made already in SEO, we realize that we still
have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do.
Question: Do you check your rankings periodically?
Erin: While we formally check our search engine rankings
weekly based on our keywords, we also informally spot check our rankings
throughout each day. We also check random words and phrases periodically
to see if there are 'quirk' areas from which we are gaining traffic.
Question: Do you monitor your traffic? Do you analyze
your traffic and use that knowledge to strengthen your site?
Erin: Yes, we do monitor our traffic. Since we are a
data-driven site, we are working very hard to increase and improve our
listings. With that, the user experience will improve, traffic will grow
and the hard work we do in the area of SEO will pay off even more. We
analyze traffic weekly and use the information to improve our placement
in search engines.
Analysis
Remember that rule number one regarding site optimization is: never mess
with success! That said, there are some interesting observations worth
mentioning regarding this site.
Noteworthy is the fact the keyword phrase -- homes for sale -- does not
appear in the main page's title, description, or keyword tags. However,
the keyphrase Houses for sale does appear.
This apparent oversight actually lends itself as evidence that the appearance
of the keyword home in incoming links that point to the Harmonhomes.com
site is a more important factor that having the keyword in the title,
at least on some engines. By the way, we've determined this by checking
LinkPopularity at http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com/ where our search
revealed the following results for HarmonHomes.com:
AltaVista: 23,630 incoming links
HotBot: 3,500 incoming links
MSN Search: 5,221 incoming links
Lycos: 1,007 incoming links
Impressive! And our research revealed that every single link on every
linking page that we happened to spot-check had the keyword homes somewhere
in the link. This fact builds an overwhelmingly strong case that incoming
links that include your keywords are critical to high relevancy scores.
In many cases ONLY the single keyword "Homes" was used to link
to the Harmonhomes.com site.
By taking into account that "Houses for sale" DOES appear in
the title, and that there is slightly less competition for the "houses
for sale" keyphrase, coupled with the finding that Harmonhomes.com
is listed way down at position #20 for houses for sales, we could further
conclude that keywords in the incoming links are MORE important that keyword(s)
in the title.
Having the keyword "homes" built into the URL is a smart strategy.
We found many of the incoming links listed as Harmon Homes -- which certainly
gets the keyword homes into the incoming link.
The fact that HarmonHomes.com is a "theme-related" site with
only a single minded focus -- homes for sale -- should also be considered
a crucial element of its successful SEO model.
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