important seo learnings from my second hand bikes blog
Some of my most useful seo learnings happen when I am trying to get my own website to rank on Google. 2 such great learnings happened while I was working on my second hand bikes blog. Since I have been helped by experiences of other members on indiblogger, I decided to share those experiences with the community.
- The importance of TLD. Try search1, search2 and search 3 on your browser. Locate secondhandbikes.org in the google search result page. You will see that the site ranks at 14th, 5th and 17th location for the same "second hand bikes" search string. I am not explaining the differences between the 3 search terms purposefully. Let us see if other seo savvy members can locate the difference. The bottomline is I was stupid to pick up .org tld for a site targetting India. Always go for a .in extension if you are going to target India.
- Exact match domain name: How many times have you seen your site get into the 5th or 15th position for your main search term in less than 1 month? A quick research will tell you that more than 15000 people search for second hand bikes every month and it is a decently competitive niche. What explains my good fortune? The domain name matches the search term exactly. To put that into perspective, I took more than 1 year to get into the first page with my used mobiles website. Used mobiles niche is much less competitive than second hand bikes. Always go for an exact match domain if you can get one.
- Old is gold As I was going through the results of search 3, I saw a posting on techjobs.co.in. It is a website about jobs and interview questions. Some member has made a post about second hand bikes on the forum and it is already ranking at 12th position within less than 12 hours since the posting. I think the age and TLD of the site is helping it rank so well.
What do you think about my observations? Have you ever used any of these tricks for your own ranking purposes? Let us have a detailed discussion .
P.S: I will like to see how many of indibloggers can figure out the difference between the 3 searches I have referred to at the top.
Hello BinaryDay,
1. Domain targetting particular country is better handled by country-specific domains. But you can also set geo targetting in google webmaster tools for your domain to target a particular county.
2. Having a .com domain with exact keyword match outperforms. Even your website doesn't have any relevant content, if your domain name contains the search terms exactly, u are likely to appear on the first on serp. This is logical also for search engines to place such websites/ domains at the top in serp because that might be a company website and if a user search for a company, the smartest search engines should place the domain name with the exact seach term at the top.
3. Old is certainly gold when it comes to websites be it your pr, google sitelinks, organic traffic, adsense approval, monetization opportunities. Aged websites perform well on these issues, no doubt.
Search1 - it is the second serp. It is not country specific search from google. I didn't find your website on the page you listed. (Google displays results according to visitors ip, using google through proxy server will give you different results using the same link as in Search1)
Search2 - it is particularly us-based search.
Search3 - is indian specific.
Hi SaurabhStar,
I am impressed with your knowledge of seo. btw you could not find my site on search1 because the site has since moved to page 1 for that search. Any advice for the site??
