Forum Moderators: open
This is a survey, not asking for keywords which you rank in. I just started a site a few weeks ago, I'm ranking higher for keywords than the 'official' site for the product is. Ie: The makers of blue widgets, I outrank them for 'blue widgets'. One of the reasons I see me outranking is because they have a complete flash site. Another product I outrank the manufacture for they dont have flash, I see their site should show up find but still im higher than they are :D
How many of you outrank official sites with your site just by using your SEO tactics?
In fact, over the years I've had a dozen or more official local, regional, and even state sites fold their sites into my network, so now I'm often lumped in with them as "one of" their official sites.
[edited by: rcjordan at 5:58 pm (utc) on May 1, 2003]
Optimize for your users and the engines will take care of the rest!
If google went down tomorrow then i would be officially be stuffed.......
What is sad is that I sat on a committee that redesigned the offical site. Classic committee. The final design looks like a patchwork quilt. All the advice I tendered regarding SE awareness was totally ignored. When it went live it was lacking title and description tags. Of the three relevant domain names they own, they picked the worst and have the other two set up to redirect. Virtually all the navigation is done with JS rollovers. They use frames. And, they opted for a graphic intensive site with miniscule copy. In fact, the only text on the home page is the phrase "Support XXXX" right above an Amazon link.
This is a high PR5 site in a category that only returns 251,000 responses on the singular single key word, and 95.400 on the plural single key word.
It was one of those experiences that reminded me again of why I hate committees.
WBF
All it takes is the right combination of the keyword phrase in the page title, heading and first couple of paragraphs on the page. It also helps to have the keyword phrase in links within the site.
We have some aggressive competitors/distributors, and while they cannot keep up in the race for the product name (WidgetThingy) they are giving me a good run for the misspelled version of our name: "Widget Thingy."
That said, I now have 3 pages in the top ten for the misspelling, and every month I'm gaining and these guys are sinking lower.
My take on this is that it depends on the SEO firepower behind the "Official Site" and perhaps more importantly, the commitment to SEO that the "Official Site" is willing to make.
There are a great many "Official Sites" who are more committed to branding, fancy graphics, and "marketing buzzwords" than they are to being found on the internet. Their loss, your gain.
I've beaten them on a couple of longer and slightly more creative phrases though, most amusing! They don't sell direct, just through their distribution channel so I can't see it bothering them much having me snapping at their heels.
I have no merit. Most of them should think about replacing 'welcome to Adobe Golive' in title and 'your browser does not support frames' in body... ;)
Brian
