SERP Experts

If you’re in a semi-competitive battle for rankings, you might want to re-think your use of keywords on the page. For the specific term/phrase you’re going after, here’s what I generally recommend:

• Used at least once in the title tag, possibly twice (or part of a phrase twice) when appropriate and not spammy looking
• At least once or twice in the meta description tag - not for rankings, but for CTR
• In the H1 tag of the page at the very top - as the true headline of the piece (this is good for users and search engines) Read the rest of this entry »

With Site Explorer becoming the new standard for competitive link research, many folks seem to have forgotten that you can still run some super-spiffy advanced link searches using Yahoo!’s classic link and linkdomain commands in the normal index. For example:

• linkdomain:serpexperts.com inurl:seo - shows pages that link to any page on SEOmoz.org with the term “SEO” in the URL
• linkdomain:serpexperts.com, linkdomain:seobook.com - shows pages that link to any page on SEOmoz.org AND any page on SEOBook.com
• linkdomain:serpexperts.com search engine marketing-site:serpexperts.com - shows pages that link to any page on SEOmoz.org (not including pages on SEOmoz.org itself) that have the word “oatmeal” somewhere on the page

You can get really creative with these to do some advanced link discovery and competitive analysis. I often use them to try and figure out why a site or page might be ranking for a term that it doesn’t appear to be heavily targeting, or to uncover potential targets for link acquisition.

p.s. Even though Microsoft took away their normal link search functionality, the linkfromdomain command still functions, i.e. linkfromdomain:serpexperts.com

If you’re attempting to conduct some reputation management through the search results, subdomains are a good choice for very powerful domains. You do have to be careful, because subdomains don’t always pass the same quality/quantity of shared link love (remember my rising tide theory) around the site. However, subdomains, unlike subpages, can fill up the entire search listing if properly employed. You’ll need a very strong site first, preferrably one that has strong links into several top-level sections and is ranking #1 for all the searches you want to dominate. From there, divide up some top level pages into, for example, services.domain.com, contact.domain.com, articles.domain.com, etc. You’ll find that these pages will often rank right below your main domain (and push down the other content) in the SERPs.

Note that this is an advanced tactic and one you should really only employ for reputation management/SERPs dominance. If you’re still trying to build up rankings and link popularity, this probably isn’t a good idea.

A few good examples: Apple, Amazon, CNN, Wikipedia