Continued from Part 4 (interview with a representative from The Shortwave Store)

Question: How much traffic do you get to the site (user sessions)?

Keith: So far this month...(on the 21st day of November): The Web site received 22,945 visits. A typical visitor examined 8.81 documents before leaving the site. A typical visit lasted for 1.25 minutes. The longest visit lasted for 79 minutes. Visitors came from 9,150 distinct Internet addresses. Please note that we expect to 'spike' in December.

Question: How large is your Web site?

Keith: Here's proof that size doesn't matter. Our site is only 33 MB including all images, cgi-bin, and downloads.

Question: Do you have a search engine marketing person on staff or do you hire an outsource company?

Keith: No one on staff is dedicated to this job. What little work we do is done internally. I get to it when I get to it. If something important comes up, I'll do a little work. Our positions on the search engines are not carefully monitored any more. I think it is important to watch it in the beginning. Make sure the site is fully functional first. Make sure you are competitive and then dedicate some real time to positioning. If you do it right once, you will only have to touch things up from time to time.

Question: How important do you consider search engine marketing to be in the success of a Web site?

Keith: We would not be here without it. Just because we don't watch our positions every day doesn't mean it's not important to us. We know we're doing well and we can tell by the number of orders we receive every day that everything is working.

Analysis of The Shortwave Store

1) This example is a good one because it typifies a fairly common approach that many online businesses take in regards to their commercial Internet presence. As Keith noted, he did his search engine optimization work in the beginning and initially spent time soliciting reciprocal links in general and then (rightly) shifted focus to securing incoming links from high quality and popular sites.

Based on his answers, one gets the feel that he is currently letting his strategy ride and tends to check his positioning on an as-needed basis. He uses his sales activity as an indicator of whether or not his SEO efforts are in need of a booster shot.

In checking his LinkPopularity we find the following numbers of incoming links...
157 in AltaVista
108 in Lycos
97 in MSN
52 in HotBot

...not bad, but not great either. And when digging a little deeper to determine the quality of those incoming links in an effort to tell whether or not they are helping the site's relevancy we find something lacking. What's missing is the keyword (shortwave) from the link descriptions.

Unlike the two sites profiled above, The Shortwave Store site lacked the keyword in any of the incoming links that we found. Instead, we found banner graphic links or non-keyword text links such as...

A comprehensive list... More Stations from Around the World
...and although the above link pointed to the URL: http://www.shortwavestore.com/shortwave-stations.html, it did not contain the keyword shortwave anywhere in the link description.
A better link description would have been...
Shortwave stations ...or at least, Shortwave stations from around the world

Another example we found of an unoptimized incoming link was...

You can also order online via our secure server at our shortwave web site. Click HERE to order.

...unoptimized because "Click HERE" is not a relevant keyword for the Shortwave store.
A better incoming link would look like this...

The Shortwave Store

And...

2) Worth noting is the fact that it's not necessarily the number (volume) of incoming links that's important; it's the quality of those incoming links. Factors such as link relevancy (i.e., are relevant keywords being used to describe your links) coupled with the link popularity of the referring site (i.e., Yahoo is a very popular and excellent referring site) are factors that help determine the validity and weight of a site's incoming links which in turn help determine a site's overall ranking.

3) On the plus side, the site focuses on a single theme and uses the keyword in the title, description, and headline tag at the top of the page -- all solid search engine optimization strategies

4) The site is also no-nonsense -- without frames, Flash, JavaScript, or dynamic content. Design simplicity is always a solid search engine strategy

5) Most importantly, the domain name contains the keyword which can only help and will never hurt a site's scoring chances.
Regardless of whatever shortcomings we've found, this site is testimony to the satisfactory success an online store can experience in a moderately competitive keyword arena simply by getting some of the search engine optimization factors right. In other words, your strategies don't have to be perfect to work well enough.

In Conclusion

Remember this important fact: You need only to "outrun" your competition, not the whole world. It's unlikely you'll ever have to do everything perfect -- you only need to outperform your competition.

Success comes from knowing the game, analyzing your competition, and just doing a better job than they do. And when you start solid and plan for the long haul, you can often enjoy the luxury of letting your work ride while it continues to produce satisfactory results with only occasional adjustments and minimum effort.