Whiteboard Friday - How to Dominate your Brands Personal Result Page

Another run down of this weeks Whiteboard Friday. Of course you can see the original in full at SEOMoz Blog
How to dominate your brands personal results page
This weeks Objective – Own 10 results and advertisements on the search result for your name – So for example we will use Visit Britain throughout to explain the points

5 tactics involved in this approach:

• 1. Visitbritain.com – Build a site that is yourbrand.com.

Because of the way that people will link to this domain naturally, Visitbritain.com will naturally rank for search query: Visit Britain.
Use this site (homepage-below the fold) to link to all other relevant information about Visit Britain –e.x. news articles, blogs, other sites, social profiles. This will also help to authenticate (by passing link juice) to all other information surrounding your brand that you want to appear in the SERPs. This helps SEO because it is giving context to which brand people are searching for and will boost the rankings in order to help other linking pages to rank.

Create a contact page that gives you all relevant information to contact. Good for SEO cause you will get the contact information indented result as well owning not only spot 1 but now 1 & 2 or 1&2 and a half


• 2. Alternative brand site
Another page for your brand that is hosted on a dominant site. E.x. www.tourismboard.com/visitbritain

This helps you to command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case more powerful) domain. These sites will compete with each other for the number one result and you can relax in the knowledge that you will hold both top results.


• 3. Social media Profiles

No surprise here, these sites rank really well and in most cases will be seen on the 1st page results (linked in, twitter, facebook). Instead of ignoring this, use it to your advantage to help dominate the SERPs . Create social profiles using your name in order to appear for these searches.


• 4. Interviews/News

Get an interview in any online newspaper or blog or anywhere you can. News stories are the types of results that Google likes to return when people are doing people searches (some other categories of searches: weather; stocks; people. Each type of search has a specific kind of results that show up)

News, social media, personal sites, and work profiles are the type of results that show up for People or brand searches. So by linking to these news, social media sites and other profiles from your brands personal domain, you are showing Google these are the results that are important to these searches. Thus helping you dominate the remainder of the SERP.


• 5. PPC – Bid on your own brand

Helpful even if you own all 10 results. Bidding on your brand allows you to control the ads on your brands SERPs. Appearing in the sponsored listings and the natural 1 result has been proven to increase click through rates.

Same time, same place, next week seomoz fans!

Whiteboard Friday - All the mistakes that we have made

Rand Returns...
“All the mistakes we have made”
Biggest mistakes that seomoz has made in their advice and in their own practice. Here are the relevant takings from todays WhiteBoard Friday!

1) Reciprocal links
Rand, back in the day, used to dabble in greyer areas of SEO. His first mistake mentions the tactic of offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via the robots.txt file using nofollow. This tactic did not really work and he ended up having to do a lot of word to get in the good graces of webmasters once again.

2) Buying links for clients.
Back in 2005 Rand was buying links for clients. Matt Cuts came out at that time to say Google were moving against paid links.
Matt called Rand and said: “Dude, I can see you are doing these paid links, I want to let you know that they are not being counted and actually they may hurt you.”
Since those days , google has grown exponentially against the buying of links and now it is considered a very bad practice. More importantly we can no longer guarantee that these links are providing value. Instead of spending the money on links, invest it in becoming more creative with your clients account.

3) H1 tags with keywords.
The realisation, after testing thoroughly through the use of formal machine learning correlation tests, that having a H1 on a page is no more valuable than having the keyword at the top of the text in large or bold font. Shock horror, the hours spent convincing a client to implement this...

4) Don’t use XML sitemaps??
Rand is mortified that he used to advise people not to use XML sitemaps. Rand’s reasoning behind this (having an XML sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) was sound but proved to be not as important as the advantage of using them. XML sitemaps do such a great job of getting content indexed. He knows so many people who have used them and seen great results and jump in traffic particularly for long tail, now he strongly recommends them.

5) Redirect Linkscape to open site explorer.
On realisation that OSE is a lot better interface than Linkscape, SEOmoz decided to 301 redirect all the old reports to OSE. Unfortunately this resulted in a loss of significant traffic to the site due to the fact that Rel=canonical was never implemented. Unfortunately a lot of the damage was already done.

Happy Friday Everyone!