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Fun with SEO

Obviously, our SEO skills leave something to be  desired...

When you type in "new york venture capital" in Yahoo! search, Union Square Ventures comes up #3, behind SuperPages and New York Life, two sites with way more traffic than ours.  That's pretty good.  (Good to see venture capital jobs in New York from Indeed come up on that first page, too.)

But in  Google, I can't even find us.  (Can't find Indeed either.)

Pitango comes in ahead of us, because they list themselves as having a New York office, even though "New York" isn't in the title of their site like ours is. 

The Davis venture fund comes in ahead of us, too... albeit on the 2nd page, because "Davis New York Venture Fund’s investment objective is long term growth of capital."  So, the words aren't together, but capital is in that sentence somewhere.

Our Feedburner feed is at the bottom of page #8, but I went all the way to page #20 and can't find our actual site at all.  Wacky, no?  I mean, the words "New York Venture Capital" are right in the title of our website, in that order.

Anybody have any ideas?

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March 16, 2006 in Venture Capital & Technology |


Simply link to the Union Square site from this blog with the anchor text "New York Venture Capital", ask others too, and I am guessing if 5-10 others do (or even just Fred's blog), you'll be number one before long.

Posted by: Niki Scevak | Mar 16, 2006 12:04:17 PM

I'm no expert on pagerank but I'll make an observation or two.

With the exception of your title and the indeed ad box "New York" appears once on your page.

Nor is the phrase "venture capital" particularly prominent within the body of the page.

You have fewer inbound links than I would have guessed
http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unionsquareventures.com%2F&btnG=Search

The domain is relatively new.


Since the page is built with typepad they think you're a blog. If you add "blog" to your search phrase:

http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+venture+capital+blog&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

You're 3rd

Just my $0.02

Posted by: Erik | Mar 16, 2006 12:29:37 PM

Are there lots of search queries for 'new york venture capital'? Could you be targeting a better keyword phrase(s) for attracting the most qualified search traffic?

No sense in ranking well for keywords that no one is searching for.

Posted by: Sebastian | Mar 16, 2006 12:54:14 PM

You definitely want to link "New York Venture Capital" when you talk about it on this blog.

I would also include a link in your sidebar.

How about this, I get you on that first page and you guys fund my startup? (j/k)

Posted by: Jackson | Mar 16, 2006 1:07:33 PM

A few suggestions: at least one keyword per every 100 (or less) words of text per page; get thee listed in DMOZ; make sure you, Fred and any one else on your team has one-way / non-reciprocal linking to USV's site.

I don't know if adding "new york venture capital" as tags to your blog posts would significantly improve Google results, but I doubt it could hurt you.

That should be a good start!

Posted by: Michael | Mar 16, 2006 1:29:37 PM

Google seems to acting very strangely the past month or so. I get different results depending upon where I am logging on from. My own site seems to vary wildly in number of pages indexed. Check out your results from http://72.14.207.104/ and compare to http://64.233.179.104

Some thing very strange is going on in Googland

Posted by: Stu | Mar 16, 2006 1:35:23 PM

Google looks at two main things: updated (often) unqiue key-word rich content and quality backlinks.

Other than that, use H1, H2, H3, and link tags a lot with your targetted keywords - this boosts the pages relevence in Google's eyes. Also, if you use PHP, you can use mod_rewrite to convert pages to HTML on the fly, which helps. Finally, create a Google Sitemap, using their tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login. That will help you get indexed.

Hope this helps.

Posted by: Justin | Mar 16, 2006 2:40:54 PM

The more links the better, but you do not need sitewide links and you need to vary the anchor text they link to you with.

Get Fred and Jason Calcanis and a few other bloggers to link to that site with variations of the keywords you are trying to rank for.

Posted by: Merrick | Mar 16, 2006 2:50:56 PM

I always tell clients: keyword/phrase density in your text, metatags and browser page title. The page title looks set on your site but the other two need help.

Here are a couple of really good sites to help.

The first is a SEO tool for determining keyword density. The second is some guy's blog where he tracks all the good factors that go into rankings in Google. I've found both very helpful.

http://googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Posted by: Rick Stratton | Mar 16, 2006 8:34:12 PM

Hello, I was referred to you by a friend.
Quickly, I noticed your Title Tag and Google Pagerank look fine. (Note: Google PR aprox. 3 months delayed). However, I do recommend playing with the Typepad Templates to include Description and Keyword META Tags to the header for a little extra keyword density.

Another thing you can do to capture the Keyword phrase "new york venture capital", is to Add it to your "About Us" on the Home page at the top left in BOLD. You could also focus on that term in your About, Portfolio pages. I would also add this same phrase to the other META tags mentioned above.

I would recommend you do some Link Buying (textlinkads.com) is a decent place to buy links. I would buy links that are highly relevant to your site such as "New York or Financial" related sites. Just need to make sure to create anchor text of "New York Venture Capital" or other phrases that you want to focus on. These would obviously be linking directly to your site. Just be careful of the "no-follow" scam with some link buying sites. Also, if there is an article or blog you want to focus more attention on, you can link directly to that also. (deep linking)

In summary: Add the following
(2)Description
(3)Keyword Meta
(4)Phrase in "About us section" in bold
(5) Link Buying
Buy Links with relevant NY or Financial related blogs or sites. Make sure your anchor text consists of the phrase/keyword you want to focus on.

If you have any questions at all, I'd be happy to help.

Posted by: Greg Meyers | Mar 17, 2006 9:41:28 AM

I think the problem isn't what you guys are doing; it's Google. This is off-the-cuff, but isn't there a lot of money to be made by someone with a search engine that doesn't require (or allow) people to have to or be able to use tricks to land in people's searches? When I search, I want relevant results based on their existence on the web somewhere, not on a contest designed around one particular engine. All that time and money will be wasted when it exists.

Posted by: Jonathan Stone | Mar 17, 2006 1:52:49 PM

Are you still in need of SEO advice? If so, the best I've come across is John Oliver Coffey. His blog is here:
http://online-traction.com/

Posted by: Tracy Sheridan | Mar 18, 2006 2:30:05 PM

Johnathon Stone makes a very very good point.

Why should we have to become SEO experts - or pay SEO experts - to appear in Google?

Posted by: Rick Stratton | Mar 18, 2006 7:42:03 PM

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