Q and A: How do I get on page 1 of Google search results?

Dear Kalena...

Hi. I am a novice with respect to SEO and have secured a company to help us. They've worked for us for roughly 5 months. I'm curious what your thoughts are about our site. From an SEO perspective, what do I need to do to get on page 1 on Google for the search term 'cufflinks'? Our major competitor is [URL removed] and it looks like they have a link farm.

Thanks,
Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mike

When I first viewed your site I thought "Uh Oh." Because it is a Yahoo! store and in the past, they have been notorious for causing search engine optimization issues.

With most Yahoo! stores, the home page sits on your domain, but the rest of the site content resides in a Yahoo! subdomain (store.yahoo.com) to enable you to edit it via their CMS template system. This means that search engines "see" your site as a single page and all the link popularity for the inner pages gets attributed to Yahoo.com and not your domain.

But according to this forum post on Search Engine Watch, having a Yahoo! store may no longer be an issue. According to that post, as long as you use the Yahoo! store platform for the back-end shopping cart and keep all your pages hosted on your own domain, you should be fine. It looks like that's what you've done, although the Yahoo! favicon on all your site pages worries me. To be sure, I would double check with your designer that all your site content resides on your own domain and not on a Yahoo! sub-domain.

Some reasons why your competitor site is out-ranking you for the keyword "cufflinks" could be because:

1) They have a Google PageRank of 4 while yours is only 3.

2) They have more backward links than you. Sure, a few of those look like bought links, but there's no law against that.

3) Their HTML code has less code bloat and smaller file size.

4) Their site is better optimized for the keyword "cufflinks" than yours.

5) They don't use a Yahoo! Store.

Sorry to throw that last one in, but I am still skeptical about the ability of a Yahoo! Store to outrank a fully hosted domain. If you really want to beat your competitor in the Google charts, I suggest moving your entire site to your domain and even upgrading your shopping cart to one used by larger retailers e.g. osCommerce, 2Checkout.

Also, why not start a blog about cufflinks? Send some unique cufflinks to celebs and write about it. Do a link trade with wedding sites for your cute bride and groom cufflinks. Use social media sites to gain attention and link popularity. There's lots of ways you can bring traffic to your site and boost that rank.


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