Search Engine Optimazation-What one thing to do???
 

Our new(er) website(1.5+ yrs) continually gets spanked by our main competitor.

The then new VP of Marketing(now marketing manager) hired a "boutique" ad agency that re-did said website(and in that last year+ has spent over 400K, with a company whose website proclaims "...offers Madison Avenue advertising agency capabilities ranging from original campaign development to creative production studios to targeted media planning and placement services.")

Well the ad agency might be good for print/video/slicks but their web creativity has left us on the bottom of page 2 using google (up from page 3, after rewording some meta tags and home page verbage). They assured us that they had a "SEO specialist" but nothing was put into writing about raising/maintaining a set level

Sales(me/others) have been screaming that we really NEED/MUST get our ranking up. We're in a small niche market with sales of ~4M/yr.

To quote an e-mail received this past Friday-"...several media companies will also be meeting with us as we move into a strategy of employing our advertising dollars to gain more clicks to our website."

The CEO is hot to have streaming video on the site and we have a quote in from yet another "specialty" agency for (sit down and hang on for this one) 7,500/month as a retainer fee.

Sales feels that if clients can't find us on the first page of any major search engine, we could have nude videos on there and it really wouldn't matter.

So what's the one thing that you'd recommend to get ranking up?

Google link: ourwebsite.com shows 55 sites linked to us
as does alexa.com. But most of the links are very dated and from things like old academic articles or nonexistent job openings(competitor shows 245)

1. Pay per click ads
2. Hire a guru(and lord there must be 2 million of em in
our small town of 165,000 people)to tweak things?(with
an SLA to back things up)
3. Current site is Flash on the home page-get rid of it?
4. Get many more and better quality links?-currently only
one of our distributors does.
5. Start blogging like crazy with links to our site.
6. Submit site map to google
7. Banner ads somewhere?
8. WHAT else?????????

Thanks for ANY and all input on This

You think this will raise your google ranking? No way.

You're wasting your time and money.

Bingo!

You're wasting your time and money.

You're wasting your time and money.

Bingo!

You're wasting your time and money.


Bottom line: you can't trick the search engines. You can for a while. In the end the cost-benefit analysis is not even close. Waste of time and money.

If you want to raise your ranking, here's an idea: make sure spiders can get to all your content (this means: no flash-based navigation, minimal javascript-dependent navigation, no "orphaned" pages, etc.) and have better content. Blogging on the site in question is a good way to incrementally generate decent content.

But if you are approaching content development and site design from a SEO perspective, you will lose. Do you really think you're smarter than Google, Yahoo, etc.? You're not.

Create good content. Make that content accessible. As a strange byproduct of this effort, people who come to your site have a better chance of accessing good content (which was their intent with their google search in the first place).

I think you (as many do) have a misunderstanding of Google. Google is NOT the traditional search engine that most optimizers were used to (pre-google). Ranking is not based on metatags or keywords and so on. Google ranking comes from number of times your website is hit by links from other sites. It is more a popularity contest. If you want to raise your google ranking try to get your site linked off other sites (your chamber of commerce, agencies within your market areas, other companies) and so on!

The company I own specializes in website development and SEO. Flash can definitely be part of the problem, but if it's tagged properly than you should be fine. There are many ways to do this besides just the meta tags.

The one thing I will say is that it usually takes time to refine the process and make it successful. You might not ever make it to number one, but you should make the top five with no problem. I often tell my clients that if search results are that important to you then pay Google to appear at the top or on the side navigation bar as what the call an "advertiser". Even at $.25 a click, it would still be cheaper than hiring a SEO guru and you would be guaranteed to appear where everyone can see you.

Content is the king, but good links help. Back in '03, I wrote up an article about how to remove the stock head-unit from an '01 Honda Civic. It did ok, getting some decent traffic. Then, I posted a few links on iPod message boards (like iLounge.com), and from there people saw it and it spread (without my intervention) to a couple of Civic owner boards, since I appear to have been the first one to do a writeup and post it on the net. If your search terms are simply ipod civic, my iPod car install page is the #2 result in Google.

(And hey, I just generated another link to my site)

Spend some time reading this website.

http://www.nikkipilkington.com/ I know this woman. She is very successful at what she does and she shares on her site some of her tricks.

Lots of articles on there.

And do away with Flash, it isn't indexed properly. Flash is great to add spice to a site but it is not so great to use for an entire site. Not if you want to be on top on search engines.

Good luck
/E

This is only a small part of the story. Google ranking is not actually based on the number of links. You could have 10 million in-links and have a lower rank than a site with only 100k in-links. Why? Because google ranking is more heavily computed based on the google ranking of the sites which link to you. So, if Joe Blow's Blog has a pagerank of 1 and links to you, it will have almost no result. If Slashdot with a pagerank of 9 links to you, it will have a large effect.

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank