SEO by Jason

I've spent years dabbling in SEO, but do not consider myself an SEO professional. Search engine optimization and search engine management (SEM) were among the many roles I fulfilled at my last job. SEO is now more of a hobby than a job for me. I still enjoy reading the many great online resources for SEO. SEOMoz in particular is my favorite. But my current websites don't really require much SEO as my business does not rely on people from around the world to find my sites. Thus it gives me the opportunity to play with my sites and see what happens. Almost like a constant experiment. In general, I have always had much greater success getting good SERPs (basically your rankings in the search engines for different keywords and phrases) in Google than in Bing or Yahoo. Which is good, since so many more people use Google than Bing or Yahoo. But sometimes it leaves you wondering why Google will like a particular phrase, and the others do not.

In the last few weeks, we have launched two online catalogs for our business. Once again our business model doesn't rely on driving traffic to these sites from the search engines. They're really intended to be online resources for our current clients. But this still gives me the opportunity to experiment with the SEO side.

We decided to purchase domain names that are keyword heavy to see the impact it might have on SERPs for these phrases. I picked two phrases that obviously relate to my industry that were available as dot coms. The phrases are Promotional Items Company and Customizable Promotional Items. These phrases have some search volume, though not nearly as much as a broader phrase such as promotional items. And it didn't appear from some quick research that there would be much competition to get these phrases high in the rankings. It appeared that the sites that were ranking well for these phrases were ranking there by default, not because they were trying to rank well for these specific phrases.

The first of the two sites went live about three weeks ago: http://www.promotionalitemscompany.com/

The second site just went live less than a full week ago: http://www.customizablepromotionalitems.com/

I've been tracking these two phrases in Google, Bing and Yahoo. As of this morning, in Google I'm ranking #14 for Promotional Items Company and ranking #14 for Customizable Promotional Items. Not bad for such a short time, and understanding that all I've really done is post some articles online with backlinks to these two sites.

As I mentioned earlier, typically I've had a much tougher time getting high rankings in Bing or Yahoo. Google literally drives about 20 times the traffic to our company site ( http://www.snappromotions.com/ ) than Bing or Yahoo.

So now, the point to this post. How have I done with these two phrases in Bing and Yahoo? This might surprise you. It certainly surprised me.

Bing: Promotional Items Company #3
Bing: Customizable Promotional Items #1
Yahoo: Promotional Items Company #3
Yahoo: Customizable Promotional Items #1

Now for those who follow SEO, Yahoo uses Bing for it's search results, but seldom do I have identical listings in the two search engines. And as I've explained, it's also rare for me to get high rankings in Yahoo or Bing. Especially rare to get better rankings than in Google.

It will be interesting to watch to see what happens from here, but it seems pretty clear that Yahoo / Bing must place a much greater importance on the words in the domain name than Google. (Written 1-9-2011.)


Here are my primary websites:
Snap Promotions: Personalized Marketing Products
My Personal Blog: Kansas City Chiefs Blog
LovePromos: A Blog on Promotional Products Industry and Small Business News
Online Catalog: Promotional Items Company
And Another Online Catalog: Customizable Promotional Items
Business Blog: Big Box of Business

Backlinks for Snap Promotions:
Statbrain
Megafoo
BibSonomy
Help
YouTube
TSNN
TV
Flixya
Alexa

My blog:
Statbrain
Megafoo
YouTube

Promotional Items Company
LJW
Megafoo
Alexa

Customizable Promotional Items
Megafoo
Alexa

Love Promos
YouTube
Alexa

Facebook Profiles
Jason's Facebook (CPI)
Kristin's Facebook (Snap)
Lee's Facebook (Snap)
Amber's Facebook (Love)
JohnnyRawz (PIC)
Harley (PBC)

Twitter We Will Go!
Snap Promotions
Lee Eldridge
CosmicLee

And some bookmarking:
MyLinkVault
FreeLinks
A1 Webmarks
blinklist
BuddyMarks
IBM
Reddit
Mixx
Delicious / Delicious Feed / Snap / Love Promos / CPI / PIC / Chiefs Blog / Biz Blog
folkd
blurpalicious
Digg

Check back for more updates!