Searching For Users: SEO as an Engine for Customer Acquisition
Posted October 2, 2008
Stephen Spencer is an SEO Wizard. He is an encyclopedia of SEO knowledge and I urge you to check out the video of his presentation and his slide set for comprehensive details.
In an earlier presentation from Dogster, Ted (their CEO) mentioned the difficulty of competing for page rank for the word “dog”, and Stephen spent the last five minutes of his presentation divulging three tactics for competing for page rank for the word “dog”.
1. Leverage some of the great tools that are available. Internet Marketing Ninjas is expensive, but worth it. It can analyze back links and anchor text. Good anchor text links (internal and external) such as “Click Here” or “Check this out” set importance, but not contextual relevance. Contact some of the sites that link to the Dogster site and ask them to change the anchor text to “Dog ster” (two separate words). It is a cool trick that will help Dogster to link for “dog”.
2. Look at the source for the homepage of Dogster and search for the “nofollow” attribute. Use this attribute for places where it doesn’t make sense to chase page rank (i.e. the link to Terms and Conditions). Looking at the Dogster homepage, there is user-generated link for Healthy Autumn Brownie Recipe which is not important compared to links to “Dog Breeds”. Set the “Healthy Autumn Brownie Recipe” to use the “nofollow” attribute.
3. Look to see who ranks in the top 10 already. What are they doing to get there? If they are using a dodgy tactic, report it to Google.
