Corporate Dominance of Generic Search Terms and the King of SEO
By James Skelland, Technical Solutions Manager, R.O.EYE
SEO is hardly a hot new topic, quite the opposite, but fact is that it’s an important issue that needs to be addressed. Consider it like a trip to the gym. Put the effort in and your site will become a slick, greased up Adonis sitting atop of the pile. If you’re not really too fussed, your site will undoubtedly become a bloated loner, languishing at the back of the queue. OK, granted that analogy is fairly crass, I’m sure Barry’s Ferret Land (Search Term:
This got me thinking about Sky. In an ideal world, the word as a search term should surely yield a mixed bag of results. The obvious TV and satellite deals from Mr Murdoch, their news and sports services, maybe a Patrick Moore fansite, or a met office page on Cumulonimbi? However, the entire first page of Google’s organic results (bar one) are all Sky.com’s various sites. Even the Wikipedia entry gets relegated to the middle of page 2. It is in fact the 3rd page that finally produces a rounded and objective list of results - I’ve never been so happy to see Vanilla Sky!
I got in touch with Richard Sliwa, who is the esteemed webmaster whose site gatecrashes Sky’s exclusive top 10 results party. He was kind enough to respond to me and pass on his SEO strategy. To find out how he does it, please send a cheque for £500 made payable to James Skelland…
I jest - but in all seriousness, he admits that it’s an old site of his that he last really took notice of around 3 years ago, when it was floating around the low 30’s. Richard cites a large portion of his page’s success to the old adage of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), involving the simple yet effective implementation of keywords, meta tags and backlinks - remembering content is king.
So how does Sky do it then? Of top 19 results in Google, 17 of them belong to Sky. Maybe the question should not be ‘how?’ - maybe we should be asking if it’s right to be able to monopolise an ambiguous word? I’ve got no qualms if, on searching for the word ‘Microsoft’, I get an infinite list of Microsoft subdomains. So does this mean that Sky is no longer even classed as an ambiguous word anymore? To be honest, the majority of people entering the search term Sky are probably only looking for a Sky TV site anyway, but it seems the knock on effect means that the only affiliates who get a sniff are the PPC’s. It’d be interesting to know the comments of affiliates on Sky’s programmes.
It’s at least a comfort to know that, despite corporations seemingly being able to take over any search term they wish, Richard Sliwa proves that there is always a way for the honest webmaster or affiliate to break into the big boys’ club. I shall leave you with a quote from the man himself to perhaps inspire you to give your site a little SEO workout…
“Online popularity is self-perpetuating even more than in the real world. Once one gets noticed to any degree, it just snowballs, and this is as true of search engines as it is with the real audience, with one feeding off the other. The most important thing, therefore, is to get noticed, by hook or by crook.”
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