SEO Help
Daniel R. Sweet recently asked for some SEO Help this way:
So, there I was. Innocently driving my car, not thinking about optimizing my website/blog for traffic, when Bill Austin gave me a call.
Being the instigator he is, he reminded me about Hittail and how I should use the data there to plan my blog posting to better attract the “long tail” traffic.
Turns out I was already on Hittail, so I was looking at my stats when I came across something I’m at a loss to explain.
For the search phrase “things to do after the interview“, I was #6 on Yahoo (now #4 thanks to a posting by Bill - Thanks Bill!), but not in the *top 50 results* on Google.
Can anyone explain that to me?
Dan
We don’t usually explain things like that but we do often fix them.
There are very few trustworthy and authoritative links to that page and none of them use the phrase
“things to do after the interview ”
as the anchor text.
By adding one link in a blog post, using that anchor text, we were able to move the site up by two places on Yahoo for that search term.
Over time, this one post might also influence Google and MSN to increase the ranking of that post in their results, perhaps moving it from #3,593 way up to #687 in the results.
The post might even move a lot higher over time based on that one blog post.
The more links using that anchor text (within constraints discussed elsewhere) the more likely the page is to show up well in the results.
Another couple of blog posts from job and career related sites might be all it takes to move the post onto the front page of Google and MSN for that search term.
That particular phrase does not get a lot of searches and might not be worth a lot of effort to rank well for but it does serve as an excellent example of how this works and how it can be used to increase results for many other search terms that are more sought after by your audience.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are trying to give more value to sites and pages that are written for human beings. When human beings in the form of commentators who are trusted in the community indicate acceptance of the content of a page and concurrence with the nature of the content, additional credence is granted to the subject post, page, site, etc.
In times past, your reputation was all that you had. These days, you have your reputation but you also have a bit of the reputation of everyone who links to you, talks about you, forwards information or links from or about you to others, etc. Trust builds trust, Authority builds authority.
Read more about Trust and Authority here:
