Blazing Minds

Something that probably didn’t occur to most business owners when they first started their business was; how many people would search online for my Brand?  Generally speaking the answer would be none (if you are a new business).  So should you do some research online first to see if there is a pot hole in the mainstream online world that you could fill in?

This is a possibility that could soon be effecting how companies brand themselves, and gives new entrepreneurial business owners a way in to compete with larger Brands.  Google is a strange beast; with its search engine algorithm changing and being “beefed” up all the time.  Currently there are about 200 ranking factors that Google uses to identify where websites should be ranked in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page).  Each one of these has a set amount of weight that identifies how important it is, so some are more important than others.

Your websites URL (so this one is: blazingminds.co.uk) is also in one of the ranking factors.  This is believed to be one of the more important values as well.  It has been argued that this ranking factor isn’t as important as it has been made out to be, but SEO’s like me still believe it to be very important.  Recently I have been noticing some of these “smaller” websites appearing in the SERPS on page one for very competitive terms, even out ranking some big brand websites.  One area that I like to think I know a thing or two about is the holiday district.  Virgin Holidays are one of the biggest tour operators in the UK, and utilise internet sales very effectively.  For the past 5-6 months Virgin holidays has ranked at number 1 for the term Caribbean holidays”, one of the most competitive terms in the “luxury holiday” industry.  However over the past few weeks they have been overtaken by a much smaller company called “Caribbean Connection”.   See image below (the sponsored links are covered, to save confusion):

This website rarely appeared on page one about 3 months ago, and now it is a strong holder of position one.  Every now and then there is a tussle between Virgin and these guys but they still manage to pull forward.  To be fair they do have a “nicer” site and it is their homepage that ranks for this term, but Virgin rank number 1 for practically every other Caribbean country holiday.

It is this sort of adversity that shows even the small business owner can trump a larger one online, with some good SEO know how and the sense to utilise the ranking factors Google has made public.  Your URL could be the factor that helps you to appear at the top of Google for your businesses best selling terms!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 7:02 am and is filed under Blogging Tips, Guests Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.