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The company I work for produced several movies and TV shows and we want get a higher placement on search engines when people search for our shows. Right now when you type in the name of our show on google, fan sites show up ahead of our official web site. We're on the second page. We pay for google adwords but that shows up on the side. We just wanna be one of the first couple of sites a searcher sees.
Thanks
Google isn't all about backlinks. That view is far too narrow.
Try http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/3507.htm [webmasterworld.com] for how to make your pages better before you go asking for links.
Right now when you type in the name of our show on google, fan sites show up ahead of our official web site.
As an impartial observor it would appear Google has it about right. The fan sites are I assume specific to a particular star or shows, whereas your site is trying to cover several stars and shows. To the searcher the fan sites may be more pertinent.
My suggestion would be to theme your site, providing groups of pages and content on specific individuals and shows. In effect tackling each key search term individually.
Links is a key thing, but official movie pages tend to be some of the worst designed pages I've ever seen when it comes to search engine optimization. Flash, text-less first pages, titles with worthless studio names, etc., etc. This may not be true of your sites, but in general it is true of official movie sites. They are made by web designers who know nothing about web business.
you should ask all the fan sites to link to you
Not gonna happen without a reciprocal link from the official site.
Sorry if this sounds rough, but I know folks that run fan sites that take great pleasure in ranking higher than the official site. There tends to be an arrogance from the Hollywood crowd, (not pointing any fingers, but I've been there), and if they don't get their way they bring out the lawyers. THAT'S the reputation the official companies have with fan sites.
I want to say I'm sorry that the official site doesn't rank higher, but Google probably has it dead-on.
You've found the right place to learn how to do it, but you may find getting a link from a fan site ranking well would be as tough as Microsoft getting a link from MikeRoweSoft.
Even though I use Microsoft's products, the chance of me linking to them is less than null.
On the bright side, some sites ranking low may link to you. Enough of those may be enough. But then there is that content thing....
We just wanna be one of the first couple of sites a searcher sees.
Gee, is that all ;)
official movie pages tend to be some of the worst designed pages I've ever seen
Testify! Yes, official movie sites are often among the worst on the Internet, if you ask me. Not just for SEO purposes, but for usability. So often, they are just not friendly to the user. Designed by video or film people, not web people.
i'm gonna try to implement some of your suggestions/whats in that guide page (well not me - i'm just gonna tell the designers to design something)
Back to the original question, to get your official movie sites to rank higher, I would recommend hiring a professional. You don't hire the neighbor kid who's pretty good with pagemaker to do the production design for your movie, why should you hire her to make your website.
