LotusJump Blog

LotusJump user Greg Witt recently asked a great question about optimizing his Swiss Alps tours website:

“As I’ve been doing my Lotusjump SEO, I’ve noticed Google’s SearchWiki that allows me to customize search results and make my SearchWiki notes available to other users.

Is there a way to use this feature as an SEO tool? Could I conceivably boost my site’s ranking by my responses?”

For those that aren’t familiar with Google’s SearchWiki, here’s a summary of the feature from the NY Times,

[Google] is introducing a new feature called SearchWiki that will allow people to modify and save their results for specific Google searches. They can move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results (or are buried too far down in the results to see). Users must be logged in to Google to use SearchWiki and can revisit their annotations when they perform the same search later.

So back to Greg’s question…can you leverage SearchWiki to boost rankings? Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search product and user experience said, “At this time we aren’t using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future.”

The fact that she even hinted at the possibility of SearchWiki influencing ranking leaves me with no doubt that it someday will. If you think about it, Google is aggregating some really valuable data with SearchWiki–actual human opinion. If their goal is to return the most relevant results for a given search term, why wouldn’t they take the average Google user’s opinion into consideration? This is the “human touch” that the mathmatic algorithm has always lacked. So I have no doubt this data will make it into the algorithm at some point–how soon, and to what degree, only Google knows.

So what now? I wouldn’t go overboard, but I’d give my honest opinion of search results in my niche, and encourage friends and clients to do so also. Be responsible and consider Karma.

But if this data someday becomes a factor, it will be nice to know that you have contributed your 2 cents.

The following 5 Steps explain how to create your own optimized subpage for a keyword of your choice.

Step 1: Choose your keyword phrase
Determine a keyword phrase that your target audience would consistently search to find the products/services offered on your website.

Step 2: Create a page for your selected keyword phrase
Have your webmaster create a new page with your existing website theme. Make sure it has any necessary calls-to-action.

Step 3: Make sure that it’s optimized for your keyword phrase
To do this, you’ll want to make sure that your keyword phrase is found in most, or all, of the following places:

• In the URL String (i.e. www.yoursite.com/your-keyword-phrase)
• In the Title Tag of the page
• In the Meta Description of the page
• In the Meta Keywords of the page
• In the Copy on the page, multiple times where appropriate
• In Bold, where appropriate
• In the Alt Tag of relevant images on the page

(A more in-depth look at these factors will be treated in next week’s post, “on-page optimization tips“.)

Step 4: Link to the optimized page from your homepage
This will pass some of the existing authority of your homepage to your newly-created, optimized page.

Step 5: Build links to the optimized page
This step is crucial to get maximum results from your efforts. It also happens to be the most difficult. Luckily, this is where the LotusJump SEO Software provides its most significant value. LotusJump simplifies the off-page optimization process by aggregating customized linkbuilding tasks and dropping them directly into your personalized account, complete with tips and instructions. No software makes linkbuilding more effective or efficient than LotusJump.

Want your website to become a top online resource for a certain keyword phrase?

Try building a page on your website specifically for it!

An optimized landing page is a tried and true PPC principle, but not many people have recognized its value for organic SEO as well. If you know that a certain keyword will drive traffic to your site, why not give that keyword its very own page? To illustrate the point, let’s imagine you’re a search engine trying to return the most relevant result for the search term “safe baby crib,” which would you pick–Result A, B or C?

Result A:

URL: www.cribs-r-us.com
Title Tag: Cribs R Us, Online Baby Crib Store, Largest Baby Crib Selection
Meta Description: “Your online resource for the largest selection of baby cribs!”
Opening sentence: “Welcome to Cribs R Us - Browse our huge inventory of different kinds of baby cribs”

Result B:

URL: www.crib-factory.com/baby-cribs
Title Tag: Browse our Cribs - Cute Baby Cribs, Safe Baby Cribs, Sturdy Baby Cribs
Meta Description: “We offer many kinds of cribs–cute baby cribs, safe baby cribs, etc”
Opening sentence: “View the images below to learn about our many types of baby cribs.”

Result C:

URL: www.cribs-r-us.com/safe-baby-crib
Title Tag: Safe Baby Crib, Safety Crib | Cribs R Us
Meta Description: “Consider our safe baby crib product line for your infant’s needs”
Opening sentence: “Sleep well knowing you’ve purchased one of the following safe baby cribs from Cribs-R-Us.com”

If you were picking the result based on on-page SEO factors alone, Option C would be chosen as the most relevant result due to the prominence (not density, mind you) of the keyword phrase on the page. Check back for next week’s post on how to create your own optimized subpage.

Now that you’ve analyzed search volume, check out the competition for your search terms first hand. Type each of your search phrases into Google and look at the first ten results. The following characteristics make your competitors more difficult to unseat:

1) The age of their domain

In other words, how long ago the domain was registered. Find out by typing their domain into a WhoIs search. Older domains are generally more authoritative

2) The number of backlinks they have

Sign up for a Yahoo account and use their Site Explorer tool to check the number of inlinks to the site (inlinks=backlinks). The more inlinks the more competitive.

3) The quality of backlinks they have

When you examine their inlinks in Yahoo’s site explorer tool, look at some of the top ones—are they from authoritative .gov or .edu sites? Are they from other authoritative .com sites? Authoritative backlinks make your competitors more authoritative as well.

4) Their Google PageRank

Download the Google toolbar to see each website’s PageRank. PageRank is a score of 1-10 assigned to each website that has been indexed by Google (1 being the least authoritative, 10 being the most). Higher PageRank = a more competitive site.