Analyzing Real-Life Examples of Top Ranking Sites, Part 1

Analyzing Real-Life Examples of Top Ranking Sites, Part 1

By Robin Nobles

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.

First Example . . .

Keyword phrase: homes for sale Site: HarmonHomes.com (http://www.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 of Harmon Homes

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.

(Continued in Part 2)

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.