Top 5 SEO Excuses
While reading through a post by Top 30 i glanced at his sig and saw this link text "Top List: Five SEO Excuses" lists some of the big excuses companies use not to do SEO. This is a rather brilliant play on the marketing side for his company. Most SEO firms tend to differentiate themselves by being able to rank for specific competitive phrases, a one word "SEO" being at the top of the list (putting words like casino, and sex aside). Now if somebody asks the question, "So how do we know your good at doing SEO?" Virante SEM will be able to respond with this link http://www.google.com/search?q=five+seo+excuses and be able to sell their services.
After following that link you can see that the 5 sub domains create a sentence between them, you should switch to virante.
A short analysis of how this went down. All 5 excuses share these characteristics:
PR 0.
Age, del.icio.us, .edu, .gov, dmoz, bloglines and yahoo dir are nonexistent.
1 Cached page.
Alexa 3,195,273
Here are the differences, or in some cases similarities. I have found these results through the SEO Extension (about which I wrote a blog yesterday which then disappeared because of blog.com).
|
you.ajaxle Y links 2,180 |
should.ajaxle Y Links 2180 |
switch.ajaxle Y Links 2170 |
|
to.ajaxle Y Links 2190 |
virante.ajaxle Y Links 2170 |
Now lets look at the on page characteristics.
The titles on each page are simply the excuse, which is what really makes this a nice looking list in the google results.
Each page has the words “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO” in heading tags. For your note all the h1-h5 tags share the same size weight and coloring. On page 1 it is an H1 tag, page 2 H2 tag, etc.
Each reason is structured like (1) followed by a heading (though not with a heading tag) which matches the page title, this is bolded. On the first excuse page “top 5 reason to avoid SEO” is bolded.
On the 2nd-5th pages there is a catch line above the Heading tag such as “Below is the number 2 reason to not use SEO...” this is not formatted in any way.
Progressively from the 2nd-5th pages there is additional line space between the short catch line and the Heading tag.
All except the last have a picture which advertises virante SEO (links to www.virante.com). There is no alt tag associated with this.
All 5 pages list the following each of these are either a default link (blue before click purple after) or they are a simple underlined sentence. If is an underlined sentence however it will be linked to the text by a java statement like so onClick="location.href='http://virante.ajaxle.com'"
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 1
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 2
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 3
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 4
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 5
However each page lists it differently, on page 1 the first link is followed by “There is no money in it. Part 1” This not a link just descriptive text.
Also on the first page there is an extra text beneath part 5’s underlined text which reads “These are the top 5 reasons to avoid SEO”
Also in part 1 the first underlined text is a link to part 1. None of the other underlined sentences are links.
Page 2
The first link is structured like so “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 1” of which the underlined part is a link. All other footer underlined things on page 2 don’t have a link.
Page 3
Structured the same way as page 2 except “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 1” and “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 2” are both links.
Page 4 is the same as the above, except ““Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 3” is a link.
Page 5 is the same as the last 4 except it has “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 4” as a link.
Conclusion
They are able to rank for this phrase by marketing for a phrase which has very little competition. These 5 pages create an associated network of pages, which google sees (especially with the same website, merely different sub domains). The reason the pages rank in proper order is for the simple fact that a static html hyperlink points the most to reason 1 the most, followed by 2 and on. Therefore within the network reason one is considered most important. The java links don’t seem to be weighted as highly by google, else the proper ranking order doesn’t make much sense.
Finishing up
If you followed the first link to Five SEO Excuses you'll have seen the DP thread listing info about how this website came to the top, and also a attempt by Top 30 to rank that thread at the top of the google serps for Five SEO Excuses. I'm all for the link love but i gotta be fair and spread it all around so heres my links for Virante,
