June 6th, 2009 | by Conrad Walton |
Why Do They Rank So High?
Why are these ranked so high? Let’s use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate them. We want to know how many pages and internal links they have on their site and how many people link to them externally, from other sites. These two factors are huge in determining search engine rankings.
westcoastseaglass.net
has 773 pages, more than I expected. It looks like every product has a page, using the same template, so they all link to each other. 773 pages is more than we can generate quickly.They have 2,149 total links, including internal links and 1,774 external links. That’s a lot. This will not be easy. Where do they get these links from? Browsing through their links quickly, it looks like they got picked up by 3 or 4 prolific blogs and put in their blogrolls. That means that there’s a link to their site from every page on these blogs. Every post on a blog can mean a lot of links quickly and easily. We’ll have to use the same strategy and maybe even target the same blogs. This looks like the top site to target.
bytheseajewelry.com
has more pages with 921 on their site. Again, this looks like it’s a page for every product and there’s a ton of products. The entire site has 1,663 total links including 785 external links. There’s a much more diverse group of sites that link here. There are some blogs, but also some stores and forums, it looks like. They have done their homework. This will be tougher to beat because they seem to have worked harder at it and done some of the things that we’ll do.
naturalseaglass.com
has 536 pages, again, mostly catalog and product pages. Total links is 1,178 but only 687 external links. They have a couple blogs that link to them for a bulk of the links, but also a very diverse group of resource type links. We’ll have to review each of them and see if we can get listed on those pages also. This is a good source for us for places to get links to our site.
relishinc.com
has 292 pages, mostly they are, guess what?, product pages. There are 546 total links including 265 external links. It looks like 2 or 3 blogs and some random links.
jewelrybydaniellerenee.com
has an amazing 5,268 pages! Most all of them end with detail?item_id=NNNN, so they are product pages. Wow, that’s a lot. She has 5,017 total links and only 335 external links, mostly from one site and a forum. I ran across this link that could be pretty valuable: seaglassartists.ning.com/.
Let’s review the pages and external links for each of these and see how it relates to their rankings.
In order of ranking:
| Site |
Pages |
Total Links |
External |
Internal |
| westcoastseaglass.net |
773 |
2,149 |
1,774 |
375 |
| bytheseajewelry.com |
921 |
1,663 |
785 |
878 |
| naturalseaglass.com |
536 |
1,178 |
687 |
491 |
| relishinc.com |
292 |
546 |
265 |
281 |
| jewelrybydaniellerenee.com |
5,268 |
5,017 |
335 |
4682 |
It looks like the number of external links is the major factor in ranking. External factors that we haven’t looked at would be the page rank of the linking sites and the “anchor text” used in the links (the actual text that you read on the external site and click on for the link to the target page). Internal factors that we haven’t looked at would be keyword density, formatting, titles, meta descriptions, and all the other “on site” SEO issues.
We now have 5 keywords to target and 5 sites to target. We’ll study those sites for more details about how to beat them. We’ll have to figure out a way to get the number of our pages up and linked to each other, then go after the external links.
Oh, and I need to meet with my friend and get her approval to work on her site first.
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