Best SEO? Content!

Sunday, November 20, 2005

When we launched our site on June 1 of this year, we were concerned on how to get known. Having a modest budget, we studied a lot of online material on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Not being experts in SEO, we tried to follow all SEO commandments very well described in the Dr. Wilson's Plain-Spoken Guide to Search Engine Optimization, which could be nicknamed the “SEO for Dummies” book.

However, neither placing keywords in strategic places across our pages nor time- and labor-consuming reciprocal link exchange (we eventually landed just few those links) did not get us too far. We were receiving very little traffic from the Big Three of Internet Search: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Neither our pages were receiving top ranking in search engine listings.

We were getting increasingly frustrated with our lousy SEO and even tried to offshore it to Israel – all in vain. Then, our focus shifted more towards R & D and for a while, we stopped caring about our search rankings.

Just recently, our guys noticed that some of our pages have already semi-descent PageRank. While this parameter is no longer solely defines a place in the Google hierarchy, it is one of few parameters that quantify the search rankings and, therefore, it still matters.

For instance, JobExposer page has PageRank of five while the Virtual Practices page has PageRank of four. Our Home and Career Matters pages have the Page Rank of three.

In order to evaluate our ranking in perspective, we would like to bring some examples of sites addressing similar niches. Home page of the strongest, to our opinion, HTML job search engine in Canada, Jobry, has the PageRank value of four. The first ever and probably the strongest news radar, Edu-RSS, run by our countryman, Stephen Downes, scores six. The best career blogs run again by our countryman (may be Canadian climate inspires the bloggers and newsmasters), Recruiting.com and BeingBold Blog, score six out of 10.

I would say that we fared not bad for five months of our Web existence.

There is a very curious and comprehensive reference on the subject – PageRank Uncovered. We learned retroactively that we have done something right to achieve this PageRank. However, we did not escape some “mishaps” either. For instance, linking out could decrease your ranking. You can count how many outbound links in this blog and make conclusions that we are not greedy in this respect. Will this finding make us to change the generous “linking out”? We doubt.

The content is a king of the Web Search Ranking. We would not like to paint a whole multi-million SEO industry in black – God forbid – but how many gimmicks and how many smoke and mirrors around. Wouldn’t be easy just to create a solid content for your web site? Wouldn’t it make a sense to hire bloggers to create dynamic and fresh content on any imaginable subject instead wasting money on link farms and expensive SEO consultants?

We believe that we proved it. We have been working hard on creating the fresh content and development of innovative products and stopped caring about our ranking. “Build it and they will come”Build the high quality content, product and service on your site and the visitors will come.

Just our two cents. Enjoy business!

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