Get to the top of Google!
Here are some extracts from the
.net magazine article:
"Your web site can be attractively designed,
easy to navigate and packed with great content, but that's no guarantee of
online success. Other internet users still need to find you somehow, and that's
unlikely to happen if you only appear on page 37 of a typical Google search.
It doesn't matter how great your product, content or services are if 600
other sites offering similar stuff all come before you in the search rankings.
But how did they get up there above you? If they can leap frog to the front of
the search results, there must be a way for you to do it, too, right? ...
We decided to pick five search engine optimisation companies, and pit them,
and their search engine skills, against each other in our SEO Challenge. The aim
was simple. We gave them a phrase that didn't currently exist in the Google
database, 'crystalline incandescence' and they were to build and promote a site
that included this phrase. After six weeks we'd see who was first in a Google
search. ...
Competitor 1
Richard Day
www.beaufortweb.co.uk
Challenge entry:
www.webvisible.co.uk
We were happy for our competitors to use sneaky or underhand techniques, but
Beaufort Web's Richard Day wasn't interested: "There was no point in winning by
using tricks that could eventually get a site banned by the search engines. So
we avoided dodgy tricks like hidden or cloaked text or links, deceptive
redirects or deceptive content”.
Instead the company took a more conventional approach, "Our strategy was to
get content on the site, www.webvisible.co.uk, optimise the pages to the key
phrase, and get links from high page-ranked sites, using the keyword phrase in
the links,” says Richard. That is, with our phrase, crystalline incandescence,
in the anchor text.
Results were immediate; "We were the first to be listed, and remained first
for two weeks,” says Richard. They also came fourth out of 128,000 when
searching for incandescence alone, and twentieth out of over three million pages
for crystalline.
Many companies claim their software could help you achieve the same result,
but Day is sceptical. "SEO needs applied intelligence. The devil is in the
detail, and there are countless sites on the web where the designer has
misunderstood the details, and countless sets of reciprocal links are set up,
which are ineffective for SEO purposes".
According to Richard, personal attention needn't be expensive; "To research
keywords and make SEO changes, based on the results, we might charge from £70
per page." £250 could buy you 15 effective inbound links and immediate results
can be gained from Pay Per Click management, while SEO helps you reduce your PPC
expenditure over time. ...
THE VERDICT
We emailed the competition rules to each SEO company at noon on a dull November
Friday, so we didn't expect rapid results. After all, they'd have to register a
domain, wait for the servers to propagate, add in-bound links from other sites,
hang around for the Google spider...
Yet, somehow one of Beaufort Web's existing sites (gotobiz.co.uk)
appeared in a Google search by Sunday morning, and their official site,
webvisible.co.uk, appeared 24 hours later. Going from a non-existent site to
being listed on Google within 72 hours was a real surprise for us, and shows you
may not need as much patience as you might expect.
The other sites soon turned up as well, but Beaufort Web held the initial
lead for a couple of weeks."
This article first appeared
in .net Issue 134 - March 2005
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