Rob Saker's Blog

If you’re reading this during the Razorfish Client Summit, I’m hoping it’s because I had the #1 organic spot for razorfunfish on Google.   I had to leave early this AM on the redeye to Atlanta for another work engagement, but I’ve asked our Razorfish team be my representative.  They asked that I blog about how I seized 31 on Google for the ‘razorfunfish’ term.

For reference, I was trying to gain top rankings for this search:

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHMA_enUS313US314&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=razorfunfish

How can you leverage the learnings from this exercise?

The easy solution is to come work for MillerCoors.  Great brands, great people, we get free beer, and I’d be able to partner with you.

Short of joining America’s Best Beer Company, you can leverage these tips:

1. It begins with rich content.  I wrote the blog post on Wednesday AM.  The content isn’t particularly engaging, or even coherent (it was after midnight Tuesday), but what it did have was keyword concentration for the razorfunfish term.  I aimed for at least 250 words with a 15-20% keyword density (15% of all words were razorfunfish).
2. Technically structure your pages correctly.  This is the biggest differentiatior in my experience.
   • The page title has razorfunfish in it, and as the first word.  I went a step further and made it completely razorfunfish.
   • The first <h1> tag on the page surrounds razorfunfish.
   • Leverage meta keywords with razorfunfish in it.
3. Did I mention keyword density? Don’t over razorfunfish, but you do need to keep mentioning razorfunfish.
4. Static URL’s with the name in the address.  Don’t use autogenerated page names.
5. Leverage software with your CMS or blogging software to assist with SEO. I use a plug-in on Wordpress that helps optimize the page.
6. Use categories. This is subtle, but Google thinks my site has a section attributed to razorfunfish.
7. Nofollow. You get bumped down in rankings if you send traffic to other sites (which is bogus).  I normally don’t leverage the nofollow tag, but I did ensure all my competitors posting links to their razorfunfish sites from mine had nofollow in their links.  Sorry guys, your links weren’t generating lift on Google.

This all sounds like a lot, but I’ve setup my blog to ensure this all happens automatically as part of my posting.  The added overhead in writing a blog is 15 seconds.

I looked at registering razorfunfish.com as a domain.  That would have enhanced my rankings, but the domain was unavailable.

Once the post is created, you need to generate awareness about it. I did a few things here.

1. Google and Yahoo Sitemaps. Hours after creating the post, Google, Yahoo and MSN were notified of my post by an XML file called a sitemap (sitemap.xml).  They’re good about following and indexing the content.
2. Links from other popular sites. I won’t go into what sites I leveraged, but I have links from around 10 sites.  You don’t need to build large link farms, especially with a virgin term like razorfunfish.
3. Google AdWords. I (and others) suspect AdWords provide a temporary boost to organic rankings. I bought razorfunfish terms on the cheap ($0.05 per click).
4. Leverage that social network.  I asked my tweeps to check out my site and post a link from their blogs.  I primarily leveraged my Twitter network, but also setup a Facebook group (razorfunfish) and a few other secret items.

Optimizing for a short-term and virgin term is much easier than running a long-term program, but the principles are the same.

How does social media change the mix?

Excluding the sitemaps.xml,  my awareness came primarily through social networks.  The power of crowds, their interest and actions is what tells Google that my post is credible.  Control the messaging on the social network locations, and you control what appears on Google.

Really hope I won, but hope more that people find this helpful.  Please shoot me a comment if you want more details on specifics.  I’ll be willing to share more details after the contest is over.

Cheers.

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