Fun with SEO
Thursday, March 16, 2006 at 06:10AM by
Charlie O'Donnell 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?


Reader Comments (13)
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 guessedhttp://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
No sense in ranking well for keywords that no one is searching for.
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)
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!
Some thing very strange is going on in Googland
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.
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.
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
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 BuyingBuy 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.
Why should we have to become SEO experts - or pay SEO experts - to appear in Google?