Cambridge Web Design - an SEO case study
"How do I get to the top of Google?"
Now there's a question.
As a professional Web developer I often get asked questions by people who see the Internet as a potential rich seam of relatively low cost sales leads or enquiries and one of the most common questions is 'How do I get my site to the top Google?' While there are a number of short-ish answers to this question, the real one is quite a long one, and to understand it enough to make any practical real-world use of such an answer one really needs to deconstruct the question.
Before we start
If all goes well, at some point this site might just appear somewhere near the top of Google's results for the search 'Cambridge web design' and of course then I'll be able to make a down-payment on an Aston Martin thanks to the resulting flood of enquiries, right? Hardly. Anyone who has done their keyword research will be able to tell you that this specific three-word search term is not exactly hot-stuff. In fact it's almost entirely commercially insignificant, which is partly why I've selected it for this case-study.
Aiming for top positions on search engines doesn't always make sense. If you're offering an inventory of stuff and you know what your margins are you can look at cost-per-click online marketing, like Google AdWords™ and Overture/Yahoo! Search Marketing, and do some pretty elementary mathematics to determine the potential value of each click or referral, but with a business like mine that is focused on building relationships with a relatively small number of select clients the last thing you need is to burn cash or time generating leads that you either can't handle or that don't match your client profile.
On the plus side
If you can secure a place in Google's natural listings for a number of search terms that bring your potential customers into contact with your website it is possible to benefit from a steady and very low-cost stream of enquiries. So, for the purpose of this demonstrational experiment, let's assume that 'Cambridge web design' is a juicy target and look at how I might go about trying to improve this site's position for the target search term, and highlight some pitfalls to avoid.
"Be the best result"
Firstly, let's consider one of the fundamental aspects of this exercise for a moment. What do search engines do? One of the reasons Google became so phenomenally popular is that is was so good at matching searches with really good results. So, if you assume that the primary function or service of Google and others is to match your search with the best result available then it seems reasonably logical to suggest that the best strategy to becoming the highest ranking match for a particular search term is to be the best result for that search term.
Content is king
Being the best result as far as the search engines are concerned is largely measured in terms of text. There are lots of influencing factors, some of which I'll expand on later, but essentially a website that has 10 pages of original information to do with Web design in Cambridge, for example, would normally be seen as a better result than sites that simply have less relavent information. In even simpler terms, a site that secifically features our example target term 'Cambridge web design' dozens of times should appear higher than one that features it only one or twice.
Is repetition Spam?
At the moment repetitive text seems to be a pretty safe way to try to boost ranking for specific search terms, but the outcome of this practice is often counter-productive as the page that ends up with the highest ranking using this method can often make no sense to its audience or is so obviously repetitive that it is quickly disregarded or shunned as untrustworthy.
The current no.1 result for 'Cambridge web design' is a classic example of someone spamming their own site to gain a better search engine ranking for a narrow range of specific search terms. The title of the home page is 'Cambridge Web design' and of the 118 words of body copy 'web design' appears 8 times and 'Cambridge' 4. However, the main reason that the site is found at position 1 is the use of 'cambridge_web_design' in the filename of practically every page of the site and the collection of links at the foot of each page that all feature 'Cambridge web design' in the anchor text.
More soon
I have some work to do in order to improve my position for 'Cambridge web design'. To begin with I'm going to see how well I can do using the relatively ethical MJB Data 'Be the best result' strategy and continue to develop this page : Cambridge web design - Web Designers and Developers in and around Cambridge.
The next stage will involve looking at Googlebot visits and checking caches and positions for a few relevant pages.