Hello blog readers,
A couple weeks ago, I chimed in here on the Quirky blog with a basic summary of the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). This week I’d like to get a little bit more practical and give you loyal Quirksters a couple pointers on how you can use a basic knowledge of SEO to help us in our ongoing quest to bring every potential customer to your pages at Quirky.
I left off last time with a lovely picture of circles and arrows on the Wikipedia article for PageRank. PageRank is an algorithm created at Stanford by Google’s founders, and it’s the backbone of Google search.
What it basically does is instead of looking at a web page and scanning it for keywords to determine what it’s about (which is how search engines used to work), Google looks at how other web pages link to you to determine what you’re all about.
The key to this is the anchor text (the blue or purple underlined part that makes up the actual link). In a nutshell, every link to your site counts as a vote saying “this site is a relevant site about ferrets“. The more sites are linking to you on the most appropriate keywords, the more relevant Google thinks you are, and the higher up you’ll be in search results. Makes sense, right?
So how can we use this? Well, for starters, when you build a link to Quirky make sure you build the link using the most valuable keywords possible. Let’s say these two links were put up on an iPad blog:
The Quirky Cloak is the greatest iPad case the world has ever seen.
The Quirky Cloak is the greatest iPad case the world has ever seen.
The first link gives us a vote on “Quirky Cloak”, which is a word we already come up in first position on and has relatively few searches.
The second link gives us a vote on “iPad case”. This word is more general, has a much higher search volume, and our current position is averaging in the 40′s. There’s no doubt that we can use that vote a lot more.
Please note: This does not mean that you should go out and build thousands of links on whatever site you can. This is called link farming, and it’s dangerous. Google’s no fool – they can tell which links are relevant and which are just trying to manipulate the system. And they’re not afraid to let you know by penalizing your site (us!) as a punishment.
Well there you go, Quirks! Go forth and link in health.
-Matt
