Analyzing Real-Life Examples of Top Ranking Sites, Part 3

Analyzing Real-Life Examples of Top Ranking Sites, Part 3

By Robin Nobles

(Continued from Part 2)

Our next example site is an online store that sells shortwave radios and accessories -- a category we'd consider to be only moderately competitive. This classification reflects, perhaps, a more middle-of-the-road analysis that would be typically applicable to the average retail store doing business online.

Keyword: shortwave
Site: The Shortwave Store - http://www.shortwavestore.com

Let's look at the site's top 10 rankings for the keyword, shortwave.

* #6 and #7 in AltaVista
* #7 in Google
* #2 in About.com Sprinks
* #1 in AOL Web Sites
* #2 in Netscape

For this article, I interviewed Keith Carcasole, owner of The Shortwave Store.

Question: Do you do anything special to boost your site's link popularity?

Keith: I used to ask for reciprocal links. However, there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day for that any more.

Now I carefully choose popular non-commercial sites where I can inexpensively advertise via a small text link. It is rumored that some search engines take the quality and popularity of the sites linking to you into consideration when determining the ranking of your site.

Recently I purchased a popular domain (http://www.worldtimezones.com) and paid to have the Web site designed. It is dedicated to time zones of the world. This handy site is great for travelers, business people and those interested in world politics. These are the same people who might be interested in purchasing a shortwave radio to pick up world news and to listen to free speech stations! Not only do I get to advertise there for free, but I get a quality link that will help increase the popularity of my shortwave site. In some ways, this is actually better than a doorway page because people are visiting the site for another reason. This exposes my site to customers who may not visit otherwise.

I highly recommend this technique to anyone who has time to develop a popular site that offers a service that may be of interest to potential customers but at the same time has nothing to do with the subject matter of your main site.

Question: How much business do you get from your Web site?

Keith: It has been extremely difficult for us to gauge how much business we get from the net because we still have customers who refuse to do business online. This is especially true around Christmas time when people want reassurance that the item that they are about to order is not out of stock and will arrive in time for Christmas. If forced to venture a guess, I would estimate that 80% of our total business from our shortwave division comes from the net, either by phone order or by secure online order. It appears that the remainder comes from radio ads and referrals from friends.

Question: Do you purchase keywords from the pay engines like Overture? If so, approximately how much do you spend each month on Overture advertising?

Keith: We buy keywords on a number of pay-per-click engines. We are currently paying about $125 per month to Overture. The sum of the rest probably totals $25 per month.

Question: If you feel comfortable with this question, I'd like to know if you're using cloaking technology on the site.

Keith: None of our sites use cloaking at this time. I plan to use cloaking on one of our other sites in the very near future. We are not doing this to Ifool' the search engines. When we change technology on our site, we will lose many of our high-ranking positions. I plan to keep our old pages cloaked so that we do not lose traffic.

Question: How do you promote your Web site offline?

Keith: Business cards, print ads in magazines and newspapers, radio ads, and when customers call our store we often direct them to the site.

Question: Do you purchase banner ads?

Keith: Not really, however this does not mean that I don't have banner ads.

1. I do advertise via FREE banner ads on my own sites. If you own another high traffic site (related or not), there is no harm in advertising your products there. Even if you create a site just for your banner, the CPM will still be a fraction of what it would cost to buy impressions elsewhere.

2. I have purchased tile ads and convinced the webmaster to switch me to small text ads for the same price. I find that this yields a higher click-through ratio.

3. Some pay-per-click search engines give you free banner impressions for your top positions, I believe.

Question: Do you monitor your traffic?

Keith: I seldom look at our stats any more. If the orders were to suddenly stop, I would take a closer look. When I look at our stats my main focus is the referrers rather than the volume of traffic.

Question: Do you analyze your traffic and use that knowledge to strengthen your site?

Keith: I like watching where our traffic is coming from. Every few months I calculate how many visitors it takes to generate one sale just to make sure we are getting a reasonable return on our advertising dollars. I use this to adjust our advertising campaigns rather than to strengthen our site.

Question: How much traffic do you get to the site (user sessions)?

Keith: So far this month...(on the 21st day of November): The Web site received 22,945 visits. A typical visitor examined 8.81 documents before leaving the site. A typical visit lasted for 1.25 minutes. The longest visit lasted for 79 minutes. Visitors came from 9,150 distinct Internet addresses. Please note that we expect to 'spike' in December.

Question: How large is your Web site?

Keith: Here's proof that size doesn't matter. Our site is only 33 MB including all images, cgi-bin, and downloads.

Question: Do you have a search engine marketing person on staff or do you hire an outsource company?

Keith: No one on staff is dedicated to this job. What little work we do is done internally. I get to it when I get to it. If something important comes up, I'll do a little work. Our positions on the search engines are not carefully monitored any more. I think it is important to watch it in the beginning. Make sure the site is fully functional first. Make sure you are competitive and then dedicate some real time to positioning. If you do it right once, you will only have to touch things up from time to time.

Question: How important do you consider search engine marketing to be in the success of a Web site?

Keith: We would not be here without it. Just because we don't watch our positions every day doesn't mean it's not important to us. We know we're doing well and we can tell by the number of orders we receive every day that everything is working.

Analysis of The Shortwave Store

This example is a good one because it typifies a fairly common approach that many online businesses take in regards to their commercial Internet presence. As Keith noted, he did his search engine optimization work in the beginning and initially spent time soliciting reciprocal links in general and then (rightly) shifted focus to securing incoming links from high quality and popular sites.

Based on his answers, one gets the feel that he is currently letting his strategy ride and tends to check his positioning on an as-needed basis. He uses his sales activity as an indicator of whether or not his SEO efforts are in need of a booster shot. In checking his LinkPopularity we find the following numbers of incoming links...

* 157 in AltaVista
* 108 in Lycos
* 97 in MSN
* 52 in HotBot

...not bad, but not great either. And when digging a little deeper to determine the quality of those incoming links in an effort to tell whether or not they are helping the site's relevancy we find something lacking. What's missing is the keyword (shortwave) from the link descriptions.

Unlike the two sites profiled above, The Shortwave Store site lacked the keyword in any of the incoming links that we found. Instead, we found banner graphic links or non-keyword text links such as...

A comprehensive list... More Stations from Around the World

...and although the above link pointed to the URL: http://www.shortwavestore.com/shortwave-stations.html, it did not contain the keyword shortwave anywhere in the link description.

A better link description would have been...

Shortwave stations
...or at least,
Shortwave stations from around the world

Another example we found of an unoptimized incoming link was...

You can also order online via our secure server at our shortwave web site. Click HERE to order.

...unoptimized because "Click HERE" is not a relevant keyword for the Shortwave store.

A better incoming link would look like this...

The Shortwave Store

And...

*Worth noting is the fact that it's not necessarily the number (volume) of incoming links that's important; it's the quality of those incoming links. Factors such as link relevancy (i.e., are relevant keywords being used to describe your links) coupled with the link popularity of the referring site (i.e., Yahoo is a very popular and excellent referring site) are factors that help determine the validity and weight of a site's incoming links which in turn help determine a site's overall ranking.

*On the plus side, the site focuses on a single theme and uses the keyword in the title, description, and headline tag at the top of the page -- all solid search engine optimization strategies.

*The site is also no-nonsense -- without frames, Flash, JavaScript, or dynamic content. Design simplicity is always a solid search engine strategy.

*Most importantly, the domain name contains the keyword which can only help and will never hurt a site's scoring chances.

Regardless of whatever shortcomings we've found, this site is testimony to the satisfactory success an online store can experience in a moderately competitive keyword arena simply by getting some of the search engine optimization factors right. In other words, your strategies don't have to be perfect to work well enough.

In Conclusion

Remember this important fact: You need only to "outrun" your competition, not the whole world. It's unlikely you'll ever have to do everything perfect -- you only need to outperform your competition.

Success comes from knowing the game, analyzing your competition, and just doing a better job than they do. And when you start solid and plan for the long haul, you can often enjoy the luxury of letting your work ride while it continues to produce satisfactory results with only occasional adjustments and minimum effort.

Robin Nobles is the Director of Training of the Academy of Web Specialists (http://www.academywebspecialists.com), where she has trained several thousand people in her online courses in search engine marketing strategies (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com). She's the content provider for GRSeo (Search Engine Optimizer) software (http://www.se-optimizer.com) and is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops across the country. She also teaches 3-day "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com), and she has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon and other bookstores.