'Bounciness' in Site Rankings
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More stories by this authorHerRoom.com, a site that sells ladies underwear, had quite the traffic problem. Despite loads of visits to its bra site, sales were flat.
Turns out the site's section featuring videos of women bounce testing the company's exercise bras had become quite the hit on YouTube.com.
Scattered all over the video-sharing site were women jogging in place to test how well support holds up for an assortment of cup sizes, and serving up all titters and snickers galore, likely to mostly high school boys. Traffic soared, but too bad none of those high school boys wanted to actually buy the exercise bras.
What to do? In this case, they called in an search engine optimization, or SEO (define) expert Sally Falkow, president of Expansion Plus, a Web marketing consultancy. They went to work on getting interest in the bounce test from beyond the YouTube universe.
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The site did some research of its own and put together a podcast featuring a medical expert warning women that not wearing a good exercise bra while working out or jogging for example can actually damage breast tissue from all the bouncing.
News organizations soon picked up notice and stories followed on MSNBC, and other general interest sites and publications. The site succeeded in turning titters into traffic that turned into bra sales.
The moral of the story? Well, there's a few. For one, explained Falkow at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, the quality of your linking and traffic matters. Don't forget that rule.
OK, you may ask, but what if you don't have the benefit of bouncing flesh to help grab eyeballs? How else can you get bouncy rankings and link love?
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Barnes & Noble's e-Reader Nook Sold Out AlreadyMemory Market Due for Big Shift in 2010Microsoft: No 'Back Door' in Windows 7Tech's H-1B Hiring Faces 'Employ America Act'Stick to some fundamentals, and don't forget the old standbys, experts say. Here are a few they listed for building traffic and placement with the search engines:
So that means linking to sites that are updated frequently, with lots of incoming and outgoing links on pages. But word to the wise, adds Chris Boggs, manager of Brulent.com. Yes, links from authoritative sources are probably the most important factor on page ranks with search engines.
After all, Boggs adds, without understanding the inbound links to your pages and pages of your competitors, you'll never get a good sense of the inbound link footprint your industry may have as well.
By push, he means use outreach to get noticed: wire service releases, networking, pitching writers and making sure your site provides an RSS feed on updates, promotions. The pull part refers to how you get them to come to you: your own site newsroom, links on social media sites that say something, and, of course, media coverage.
The stories of PR people or other company reps who have no clue about what the press person/journo/blogger write about are numerous. Don't be one of them. Instead, become a reliable source rather than a flack to be avoided.
Journalists hang up on you, but bloggers will embarrass you. Journalists research articles according to beats with editorial oversight. Bloggers tend to write opinion. So don't send a press release to a blogger -- they don't write articles, they link to them!
Remember the rules, the basics and find a compelling story to help get your product in front of the audience you want to reach. Remember that your business has a story. Or, if you're like me, your business is the story. Hopefully, it'll get you the bounce you're looking for.
Erin Joyce is executive editor of InternetNews.com.
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