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Posts Tagged ‘Rankings’

First Page on Google

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We are a SEM Blog and so we should be targeting that key term. Is it popular though? Personally, I’m not 100% sure about it, unless others agree.

I went to Google Adwords Keyword Tool and found that the term “SEM Blog” achieves 14,800 Global Monthly Searches. It is deemed a “High Advertiser Competition” keyword, so I would say it is quite a good term to target. It also has about 8 million results, so it is a fair amount to top.

There are 160 separate websites for Google Search Engine. They are the site’s ccTLD‘s and the Google.com is the major one. For time reasons, and purpose, I won’t go through all of them, but with the ones I have listed as countries with traffic to SEM Reach, I will search “SEM Blog” and see where we rank:

1. Australia: 7th
2. USA: 9th
3. UK: 6th
4. India: 8th
5. Canada: 8th
6. Switzerland: 18th
7. Singapore: 9th
8. Japan: 42nd
10. France: 9th

From the searches above, it appears that we are ranking quite well after a short amount of time. Although we are targeting SEM Blog right now, we do hope to rank well for another search term which will hopefully come from optimization and through the content we deliver.

So after 3 weeks, I am pleased to say we have achieved first page results for a fairly competitive keyword. Thanks to those who helped and commented!

Posted by Admin on April 28th, 2010

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Preference of TLD

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Various people mention that the .com extension ranks better than any other extension. People say that a .com extension is worth more than any other extension. Both statements are not true, nor are they false.

When Google bot crawls through your site, they are indexing the content. At not point do they determine the .com or the domain itself as the sole ranking factor. Search engine bots crawl through the content of a site; not the domain or the extension.

So right now, we understand what bots index. But how does this relate to how your site ranks? Search engines do not rank your site because you own the .com extension and your next door neighbour owns the .info extension. To stress it once more, Google’s focus is on the content of the site as well as many other search engines.

As a simple experiment, I will test it with a simple query, pr checker to see what are the extensions. Here are the results:

  1. .info
  2. .net
  3. .com
  4. .com
  5. .com
  6. .com
  7. .net
  8. .com
  9. .org
  10. .com

Four out of ten results were not a .com extension and those three sites had quality content, thus being searched more often. Your TLD is not a factor in how well your site ranks in searches.

Another common question is if there is a developed .com and you want the .net version, should you take it?

This is a varying answer and can’t be answered with one answer for all cases. If you were to go out and see that blog.com was taken and developed and the blog.net wasn’t, then I would go for it. Blog being a competitive keyword helps in terms of remembering your domain, selling point value and essentially how you rank.

However, if you are dealing with a unique domain, you’d best stay away from the .net version as you will run into trouble in how you develop it. Although content is important, starting from scratch is the hardest part. When all traffic is going towards the .com version, it makes it hard for your .net to shine.

Nonetheless, it is the content which matters when it comes to rankings. There is no preference of TLDs when it comes to rankings. So remember, quality, updated and new content is what search engines love.

Posted by Admin on April 24th, 2010

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WWW in Domains

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You can access many sites with or without the “www” in front of the network name. You may have noticed that for SEM Reach, you can use www.semreach.com but if you use semreach.com, if redirects to www.semreach.com. Why? How does all this relate to SEO?

Components of a URL

Your URL (uniform resource locator) is made of separate parts, and when all collated together, packets of a site get sent to you, displaying a web page or such. Simply, this is what your URL is made of:

Protocol: http://
Host/Hostname: www.semreach.com
Subdomain: www
Network Name: semreach
TLD and/or Extension: .com

Relation to SEO

As you can see, SEM Reach uses all parts, including the subdomain of “www“. Ok, so how does all this relate to SEO? Well, “www.semreach.com” is just like “forums.semreach.com” or “blog.semreach.com“. Its another subdomain from the rest. However, the difference is that “www.semreach.com” is equivalent to “semreach.com” in terms of the content displayed. When you go to Google and search for a domain, you potentially will get two results for that web page. “www” and without “www“. You get two websites and therefore the two websites can rank differently in rankings.

You could get a PR5 for the “www” domain and a PR2 for the one without “www“. Its because people can link to your site with either domains and still get the same result. This has been a factor in the way your site performs where people only look at either of the domains.

How to fix this issue?

Its actually the simplest hacks you could do. Through your .htacess, you are doing a 301 redirect. The two options are:

Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect www.domain.com to domain.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Be sure to change domain.com to your own domain.

Now whatever version you type into your search engine, or whatever others have linked your to, you will always get one result over the other. This can affect your site’s ranking performance over a long period of time.

Code Source

Posted by Admin on April 23rd, 2010

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