Continued from Part 1 (interview from representative of Harmon Homes)

Question: Do you hire a professional SEO or outsource your SEO work, or do you do the search engine work yourself?

Erin: We have a full-time Web Promotions Specialist who handles SEO for HarmonHomes.com, in addition to three other Trader-owned sites. She has a Web development background and conducts extensive research on SEO topics. Even with a full-time person allocated to these efforts and significant strides made already in SEO, we realize that we still have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do.

Question: Do you check your rankings periodically?

Erin: While we formally check our search engine rankings weekly based on our keywords, we also informally spot check our rankings throughout each day. We also check random words and phrases periodically to see if there are 'quirk' areas from which we are gaining traffic.

Question: Do you monitor your traffic? Do you analyze your traffic and use that knowledge to strengthen your site?

Erin: Yes, we do monitor our traffic. Since we are a data-driven site, we are working very hard to increase and improve our listings. With that, the user experience will improve, traffic will grow and the hard work we do in the area of SEO will pay off even more. We analyze traffic weekly and use the information to improve our placement in search engines.

Analysis of Harmon Homes

Remember that rule number one regarding site optimization is: never mess with success! That said, there are some interesting observations worth mentioning regarding this site.

1) Noteworthy is the fact the keyword phrase -- homes for sale -- does not appear in the main page's title, description, or keyword tags. However, the keyphrase Houses for sale does appear.

This apparent oversight actually lends itself as evidence that the appearance of the keyword home in incoming links that point to the Harmonhomes.com site is a more important factor that having the keyword in the title, at least on some engines. By the way, we've determined this by checking LinkPopularity at http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com/ where our search revealed the following results for HarmonHomes.com:

AltaVista: 23,630 incoming links
HotBot: 3,500 incoming links
MSN Search: 5,221 incoming links
Lycos: 1,007 incoming links

Impressive! And our research revealed that every single link on every linking page that we happened to spot-check had the keyword homes somewhere in the link. This fact builds an overwhelmingly strong case that incoming links that include your keywords are critical to high relevancy scores. In many cases ONLY the single keyword "Homes" was used to link to the Harmonhomes.com site.

2) By taking into account that "Houses for sale" DOES appear in the title, and that there is slightly less competition for the "houses for sale" keyphrase, coupled with the finding that Harmonhomes.com is listed way down at position #20 for houses for sales, we could further conclude that keywords in the incoming links are MORE important that keyword(s) in the title.

3) Having the keyword "homes" built into the URL is a smart strategy. We found many of the incoming links listed as Harmon Homes -- which certainly gets the keyword homes into the incoming link.

4) The fact that HarmonHomes.com is a "theme-related" site with only a single minded focus -- homes for sale -- should also be considered a crucial element of its successful SEO model.

Now, let's look at another top ranking site.

Example 2 . . .

Keyword phrase: used cars

Site: Used Cars Online - (http://www.ausedcar.com)
Used Cars Online boasts the following top ten rankings...

#1 in Yahoo! Web Sites (directory)
#1 in AltaVista
#3 in Lycos
#3 in pure Inktomi results
#8 in Google

Used Cars Online is just what the domain name suggests: a Web site devoted to buying and selling used cars. Phil Anderson is one of the site's Webmasters and he's in charge of the search engine marketing aspects of the site.

Phil was good enough to answer the following interview questions:

Question: Do you do anything special to boost your site's link popularity?

Phil: We just ensure that we are on every search engine, and we work with several affiliates in sort of a link exchange. We are also linked to or bookmarked by several hundred Web sites.

Question: How much business do you get from your Web site?

Phil: We look for a 2% sales rate based on the number of people that view our site and make it as far as the sales page. (Most of our money is made by people placing ads). We usually make this 2% quota.

Question: Do you purchase keywords from the pay engines like Overture?

Phil: No, we are listed high enough on enough major search engines that we don't feel it's justified to pay for keyword search engines. Incidentally, we still end up on some of them any way.

Continued in Part 3. Contact Robin Nobles at RobinN@acws.com for the complete article.