~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Tad Gospodarek
Hi Heather and Jill,
I don't know if this issue has been previously discussed, but here
goes anyway. Do you think that achieving a high position in the search
engines has anything to do with the size and/or popularity of a
company? Let's look at Sony as an example. I know it's quite evident
that Sony.com will rank highly in a search because of their brand
awareness around the world. But let's bring it down a level and look
at it this way -- do you think that because Sony is such a well-known
company they automatically will rank well in the search engines based
on the keywords radios, televisions, phones, etc.?
However it may be that a smaller, lesser-known company has a better
site designed more specifically for search engine optimization, and
under the same keywords is not ranking within the top 20 listings. I
guess what it comes down to is do you think there is a bureaucracy at
work with the search engines, that bigger and better companies achieve
higher rankings just because they are bigger or may have an "in" with
some of the search engines? Essentially automatically lessening the
chances of their smaller competitors ever ranking close to them?
I am one of the "lesser-knowns" in our industry to some extent, and am
hoping that with proper SEO techniques and marketing to meet our
competition in rankings, and want to know if it's at all possible if
such a bureaucracy exists.
I appreciate your time. Thank you!
Regards,
Tad Gospodarek
Communications Coordinator
S p e c t r a C o m, I n c.
Visit us at http://www.spectracom.com
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Tad,
This is a very interesting question. It's one that I'm sure many of
the "little guys" on the Internet often worry about. After all,
what's the point in optimizing your site for high rankings, if someone
like Sony can come in and do nothing, but still be number one in the
rankings?
The good news is that it appears at this point in time, size doesn't
matter. The big players like Sony do not have any top positions
wrapped up in the engines. A quick check in a few of the major
engines for the word "televisions," showed no signs of www.sony.com in
the top results. What did come up were many smaller online and
offline retailers who sell Sony TVs. At AltaVista, the television
search did bring about a link at the top asking if you wanted to
narrow your search to "Sony Televisions." However, a click on this
link didn't even bring up the Sony home page. Furthermore, a quick
visit to the Sony site shows a strictly graphical, unoptimized Web
site, with no mention of the word television (or any other word!) on
it. Luckily for the little guy, the big guys like Sony *still* don't
have a clue! Either that, or they have no interest in ranking high in
the engines. They rightly figure that people looking for them will
find them simply by trying www.sony.com, as I did.
What you may find with many big companies (and I didn't see this with
Sony) is that they purchase banner ads and the like for particular
keywords. These will show up when someone types in the purchased
keywords. However, banner ads apparently aren't clicked on very much
any more, so these are not a big threat to the little guy either.
Experienced Web surfers will usually only click on actual search
engine results (and often only those in the top ten, or possibly 20).
So if you sell Sony TVs and want to rank high for that phrase, it's
critical to be sure you utilize all possible, legitimate optimization
techniques that are discussed here each week.
I find that the best way to approach an optimization is to not even
think about what your competition is or is not doing. Worry about
what YOU need to do to YOUR site to make it the best it can be. Since
creating great keyword-rich marketing copy is seemingly a foreign
concept to most webmasters out there, you're going to have the jump on
much of your competition right off the bat. Know that your high
rankings will not come overnight, but over time, you WILL see the
fruits of your labor.
There is one thing to be aware of when your competition is a company
such as Sony: link popularity. Because Sony is well known, it's a
given that it will have many, many links pointing to its site from
other sites. A link check at AltaVista showed that 114,095 sites had
links to the Sony site. This would lead one to believe that the Sony
site should also be ranking high simply by link popularity alone.
However, in reality, this is a great example of how link popularity is
over-rated and misunderstood. If Sony cared about ranking high for
the words "televisions" or even "Sony televisions," (and apparently
they don't), they would want their 100,000 plus links to have
something to do with television. A look at the top links pointing to
them shows that none of them have anything to do with television at
all. Which explains why link popularity is not playing a role in
helping Sony out in this area. For more information about how link
popularity works, please see my newly published article, "Link
Popularity and its Affect on Search Engine Rankings". The bottom line is that the Sony site is neither optimized for these keywords, nor does
it have much link popularity for these keywords. This illustrates the
fact that if YOU can create a site that has both of these things going
for it, you could have a winner on your hands, regardless of your
size.
Jill
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