The search engines appear to agree with me. The site has a Google page rank of five. And, my latest rankings for search terms that matter to me are 18 first positions on page one and 49 among the top five for four search engines. Not bad, but still not good enough to compete with the big boys (and girls ;-). By the big boys I mean real estate sites that offer zilch information but that have saturated the web so thoroughly they pop up everywhere.
This is one of the intrinsic problems of searching the Web: you search for anything and ebay and amazon come up - if not organically then as sponsored links. So you want to buy underwear? Result: “read all about underwear at amazon.com.” Not relevant and not what I was looking for. The same is true for real estate web searches.
The lessons I learned are these: you stop working on your website you drop off the radar screen. You add content, improve your navigation, refine the design, define your voice and you’ll see improved results. Adding a Google site map also helped.
What’s inspired me to pay again more attention to my website is ActiveRain with so many experts on all matters of interest. Meeting these experts on ActiveRain has its advantages. You see their faces, read what they say about themselves, read their blogs and their comments. They, in turn, see all that about you.
I contacted one of these experts (any guesses, here?) and found out that we had more in common than an interest in search engine optimization and the blogging sphere. I received invaluable advice for free and have contracted with that person for work. What’s important is that this all happens on the basis of mutual respect. Both parties will give free advice to each other and the relationship will be mutually beneficial.
Still, keeping up with the web tools and trends is becoming more and more difficult. What inspired me for the last round of refinements was one of the AR experts and a book I bought. The book is “designing with web standards” by Jeffrey Zeldman, (see Amazon.com) who is also the publisher of A List Apart, my absolute favorite site on web design for more years than I can remember.
But, then again, my past is in design and branding. And, despite having neglected my branding site for years it still has a Google page rank of four. So, relevant content does matter!
© 2006, Gerhard N. Ade
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