Jun 07
Search Engine Wrestling Matches
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Google and I are circling each other around the ring, and I’m trying to spot his weaknesses so that I can pounce.
In the last month Google has sent YuppieChef 665 visitors. That’s not a bad number in itself, but unfortunately our legacy of having recipes on the site means that a lot of visitors came looking for “mulva pudding” and “cooking game fillet”. There is a chance that those people might spend some money on cooking tools, but it’s more likely they’ll take their recipe and head back to the kitchen and use what they’ve got. We need more targetted traffic!
Currently (18 June 2007) on Google, if you limit the results to South African sites only and search for “KitchenAid”, we came up 5th, behind a semi-competitor and an auction site. Try the search here. There are many theories about how to improve search engine rankings, but “inbound links” is probably the leading one - if lots of people link to our site then we must be important, and if they link to us with a particularly word then we must be important for that topic. So to experiment a bit, and use this blog as a shameless promotor of our stuff, I’m going to write the next paragraph in a way that tells Google we’re important for the word “KitchenAid”, and some appliance names, and we have a great cafe category.
YuppieChef is the leading South African online store for buying the KitchenAid range of mixers, food processors, blenders and coffee machines.
Now we sit back and wait a few months to see what happens. This method is the same one that was used by bloggers to manipulate Google so that if you searched for “miserable failure” it would bring up George Bush’s page on the Whitehouse website at number one. They way they did it was to ask everyone to link to that page and use the words “miserable failure” as the text. Google rates the text in those links so highly that it didn’t matter that the Whitehouse page itself didn’t contain that phrase at all. If you do the same search now the page doesn’t appear any more, which is probably because the Whitehouse removed that page.
If you have a site or a blog and want to participate in a similar experiment, how about linking to some of the pages on YuppieChef like I did in the paragraph above, and we’ll see how well we do at beating the system?
And now, while I’m in the mood, here are a few more:
Buy Global Knives from YuppieChef and have them delivered to your door, anywhere in South Africa.
YuppieChef also stocks Eva Solo kitchenware, Trebimbi kids cutlery and Chef’n kitchen gadgets.
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Hi Andrew
Try adding a title tag in the htlm code of the links, works even better. Say for instance the link text is coffee machines, the title tag could be title=”widest range in coffee machine you can buy online in South Africa
Google picks that up too very quickly ;-), plus it gives your ‘readers’ or visitors more specific information where the link is going to take them.
Karin H. (Keep It simple Sweetheart, specially in business
What’s important to is that the people that use link titles to link to your pages are sites that are related to kitchenware and cooking etc…
Linking to your site from a Home Loans website has very little impact on your back link strategy.
I hear your point WizardMan, but disagree slightly. Obviously a relevant site’s link is better than an irrelevant site, but a link is still a link.
Remember all those sites that linked to George Bush’s page with the keyword “miserable failure”? I doubt those sites could have been classified as “related to miserable failure”, and yet it worked.
I’m clearly a little late on commenting on this one, but anyway..
I don’t think you’ll get as much benefit as you’re hoping because Google will know that you’re sitting on the same IP address as yuppiechef.co.za. As far as I’m aware, google knows who’s in your website’s neighbourhood.
s
Hi Scott
I can imagine that Google would have the brains to do something like that. Then again, it’s almost as easy to get some hosting accounts on international servers (even pay for unique IP’s for them) and point links here.
My personal philosophy is to try to (honestly) get links to our sites, and trust that somehow Google will work out the difference between real fraudsters and us. There are a lot worse things you can do then link to your site from your own company blog!
Andrew