Web Design and SEO, a Match made in Heaven
Thursday, September 3, 2009
She was a taller dame, stumbling through my doorway a mess. No stranger to the situation, I tossed her a fresh box of tissues from my desk drawer. “So whats eatin’ you sweetheart?”
“Google. I think he’s..” But that was all I needed to hear. Google, Bing, Yahoo!, they were all the same, honestly. Mascara running, red eyed, and wondering where their Search Engine ranking had gone. I’d grown rather tired of chasing Google around with a camera hanging off my neck, but the only thing emptier than my stomach was my bank account and my bottle. In my mind I’d already decided to take on the case, and I had an idea of a good starting place…
“Did you have any websites that you last saw Google with, maybe a competitor’s website?”
Yes, you too can become a detective. A Search Engine Optimization detective. What does this mean? It means scoping out your competition’s Search Engine Marketing campaign in order to see what Keywords and Key Phrases that they’re optimizing for.
It’s simple, just brainstorm about what search terms are performing well for your desired traffic niche. Do some research using
Google’s Keyword Search Tool and find out which websites are gaining the best search engine results for those keywords or key phrases. Once you have your terms sighted, check out their website with an SEO addon for your web browser. It should list all their META data, number of outbound/inbound links, page rank, etc. It basically gives you a full report on their SEO information.
How can this help? Let’s say you are in the Re-Bath industry in Texas, and you want to tailor a local Online Marketing campaign for some terms that generate significant and relevant traffic for your business. Visit your favorite search engine keyword research tool, and search for some good terms. If you find something like “texas rebath” or “texas bathroom remodeling”, perform a search on these terms and see which websites pop up on the first pages. You should be able to find out how many outbound/inbound links they have, what is in their META data, the keyword density of the website copy, and many other aspects of their website’s SEO. Don’t forget to investigate their website’s navigational structure and social media campaign as well.
Is this cheating? Not at all. A search engine’s primary function is to put relevant information in searchers’ hands. This means that all SEO and Search Engine Marketing revolves around data transparency. After all, search engines find their information just like users do, by crawling the web, they just do it amazingly fast with their automated web crawlers. This means that you can find the same information as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
This means that you can investigate what your higher ranked competing websites are doing correctly and adjust your search engine marketing campaign accordingly. This does NOT mean you should throw your campaign out the door and copy someone else’s, but it does mean that you have the power to adjust your plan according to the techniques that prove themselves to be successful.
While legal repercussions should keep you from staking out your competitor’s house in the wee hours of the morning, you can still grab a cool looking fedora hat, put on your best Dick Tracy imitation, and start looking into what the top ranked websites are doing to get the attention of the big search engines. Then just apply as needed to your own campaign, and see your website rise in the search engine rankings.