Your Rank In Search Results...How To Compare Against Competitors

Since launching ProductCritic last month, I've learned a lot from other bloggers about various terms and tools that you should use to optimize, improve, and gather information about your site or blog.

What is SERP? It stands for Search Engine Results Pages. SERP tools help you gather information on where your site ranks on the search engines for various search terms. My favorite SERP tool is Shoemoney's Serps Script. It's really free, fast, has nothing extraneous, and works great for comparing where ProductCritic ranks against its competitors. I also use it to compare the rankings for ProducCritic against one of the largest technology review sites on the Internet....CNET.

Not surprisingly, for a site that only launched a month ago, ProductCritic doesn't rank at all for the generic and most popular keyword searches like "digital camera review". What is surprising to me is that some of the "long tail" terms (I'll post a blog entry on short tails, long tails, and hittail next week) rank incredibly well for ProductCritic and we actually beat CNET for those terms!

For example, using Shoemoney's SERP tool, I found that for the search term "vpc-hd1a review" (one of the camcorders on the site), ProductCritic ranked #4 on Google and #8 on MSN while CNET, for the same search term, ranked #9 on Google and #22 on MSN. Disappointingly, for the same search term, ProductCritic doesn't even rank on Yahoo! but CNET is ranked #1 on there. Nevertheless, I'm greatly encouraged that, for some terms, a new site like ProductCritic can rank higher than a site like CNET for the same relevance of content.

Even more encouraging for me is that the same searches for ProductCritic competitors (like wize.com) show up at #41 on Google and don't even rank on MSN (some didn't rank on any search sites). We obviously still have lots of work to do for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but Shoemoney's SERP tool helps us quickly compare ourselves against other sites and gauge our progress as the months go by.

Shoemoney is one of the most successful Google Adsense publishers on the net with hundreds of sites and thousands of domain names. Providing something like his SERPs tool is impressive to me as he provides it for free and it helps many other bloggers and site owners using his success as inspiration to continue to work hard.

Yahoo Challenging Google Adwords

PC World has an article about Yahoo's revamped Sponsored Search. I haven't tried Google Adwords yet as I'm still trying to figure out what keywords I'd use for ProductCritic. Since Yahoo only has 22% of the US search market vs. Google's 63%, you might be able to buy keywords for cheaper with Yahoo's Sponsored Search. Since you can't use Adsense and Yahoo ads together on the same site (even if they don't appear on the same page), I'm sticking with Adsense until I have a much better sense of what's working and what isn't.

One of the tools I'm using to determine the best keywords is HitTail. I'll provide more details in a followup post detailing some of the tools and sites I'm using the manage this blog and the main ProductCritic site.

Interview With SEO Book Author Aaron Wall

Jonathan Leger has a great blog dedicated to Adsense, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and Internet Marketing. Yesterday, he conducted an online group Question & Answer session with Aaron Walls, the SEO expert and author of the popular SEO Book.

If you joined Jonathan's list, you would have received an announcement about when the Q&A session was taking place and how to participate. I did not get a chance to do that. Fortunately, Jonathan, who continually impresses me with his professionalism and blog smarts, has posted a transcript of the session.

If you are at all interested in SEO, Adsense, or how to start an online career, I highly suggest you go to Jonathan's blog and read the transcript.

Most Important Search Optimization Technique - Page Titles

Since ProductCritic is the first site that Gerry and I have worked together on, I learned a lot along the way. One of the most important topics (aside from content and database schema and the look of the site via CSS) is that once we launched the site, how would people find it?

Naturally, we're hoping that this blog will help with that (then again, how will most people find this blog?) but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge part in people finding the site.

While there are a lot of topics when it comes to SEO, we decided to target the easiest and most natural strategies. At the top of the list is ensuring that every page on your site has a proper title (what is displayed at the top of the browser window).

If you go through ProductCritic, you will notice that every page has a unique title that is very specific to the content on that page. If you go to Digital Cameras, the title is "Digital Camera Reviews - ProductCritic". If you go to a specific product, like the Nikon D80 (which BTW, is the highest ranked product on the site so far), the title is "Nikon D80 Reviews - ProductCritic". We've learned that, while the title should be relatively short, you should put the main purpose of the page in the title and you should put your company name after that. The reason for this is so that when the page shows up on a search result, the main topic is what's most prominent (e.g. "Nikon D80 Reviews") and if anything does get cut off, it will most likely be your company name (which is not the main interest of the search anyways).

The Copywriting Maven has a good short summary on this topic. What I find interesting though is that their blog entry doesn't take it's own advice! That page's title is "The Copywriting Maven: Top 10 SEO Copywriting Tips to Ranking Success: Tip #1 -- Title Tags" which goes against some of their own points.