How to Maximize Search Engine Results (SERPs)

When I consult with clients, I find managing expectations is very important.  What SEO clients want to know is, “When will I see results?”  I normally counsel them it can take up to six months to see results on a web page.  Blogs, however can be much faster.  There are several reasons for this which I will discuss in future articles.

In launching this blog, I made a few adjustments to my normal strategy and its paid off quite well.  One of the most discouraging things about starting a new blog is a lack of feedback from the audience, because there isn’t one.  As you can see from this graph, I didn’t have to wait too long to start seeing results.

Visitors started posting comments right away too.  For me, the most important result I want is to show up on search engines.  Fortunately I didn’t have to wait too long for that either.  Earlier this week, I wrote a series on how to use Facebook.  It turned out to be quite popular.  In fact, if you searched for “how should Facebook be used” this site turned up number one out of over a billion search results.  I was quite shocked because that result seemed to defy Google’s result algorithm which is a complex combination of number of inbound links, number of relevant inbound links,  Pagerank, length of time the domain has been active and a number of other factors too complex for this article.

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to figure out why I got this ranking.  Usually, the most important factor is inbound links.  I’ve received a few in a short time because I utilize RSS that puts this content on other sites, but not enough to generate that kind of result.  The WordPress domain name has been around for a while so that helps, but nothing could explain how this little blog was out ranking about.com and facebook.com…the two SERPs that now are currently ahead of me.

So I did another search…this time putting my phrase in quotation marks…which gives me an exact number of sites that have that exact phrase.  There are only 743 pages with results.  That’s a lot less than the 1.8 billion results that show up containing some form of that phrase.

Now I know it’s not that competitive of a key phrase, but there are still hundreds of sites that have been around longer than mine and I’m outranking them.  So let’s look a little closer.  What is the next best result?

FaceBook : Good or Bad for Communication: Looking at Effect of …

On Balance : How Should FaceBook Be Used? As with other enabling technologies, such as email, web search engines, and online publishing outlets like …
social-networking-tagging.suite101.com/…/facebook_good_or_bad_for_communication – Cached – Similar –

This one shows up fourth…after three variations of mine.  It was written in May of this year, so it’s definitely been around longer.  It’s got 5500 inbound links to it’s domain.  So what’s different between my SERP and their SERP?  It’s the title.  Now look at mine –

How Should Facebook be Used? « Seo by Swaby

How Should Facebook be Used? August 27th, 2009 seobyswaby Leave a comment Go to comments. Cocktail party. My personal opinion of Facebook is it’s an odd …
seobyswaby.wordpress.com/…/how-should-facebook-be-used/

Matching titles to content is one of the keys to maximizing search engine results.  For a blog this is especially true.

Here’s how –

The page title is automatically turned into the URL, so you get double exposure to the key phrase.

Repeat the page title, or parts of the page title in the body of your article and it will show up in the description portion of the SERP.

Aug 27, 2009 … I’ll have part II on how should Facebook be used tomorrow. … How do you think Facebook should be used? http://bit.ly/Qb5aw 50 minutes ago

Utilize your blog’s capability to show past articles.  I’m using RSS to show my latest posts.

I’m also showing my Twitter feed which serves as more repetition for my key phrase.

How do you think Facebook should be used? http://bit.ly/Qb5aw 50 minutes ago

What about regular web pages?  The same results will occur.  Matching up meta data is one of the first things I do when optimizing a static web page.

What is the take away from all this?  Pay very close attention to your page titles when blogging and performing SEO on websites.  Utilizing good, solid keyphrases and repeating them on your site is an excellent way to beat the competition and maximize your search results.

How Should Facebook be Used