Greetings from North East Scotland! I enjoy your emails very much as SEO is important to us. Would there be any chance of you reviewing our site from a SE rankings perspective? We have difficulties competing on terms against free translation providers (like Babelfish and freetranslation who have huge link pops) and would like help in overcoming this.
Christian
http://www.lingo24.com
Hi Christian,
I took a look at your site in regards to SEO strategies. Well, actually I looked at your site and then your two main competitors to see what they’re doing and how their techniques could help you.
First I’ll look at their strategies, and then at some changes you could make to your own site.
When I Google for “translation,” freetranslation.com comes up first. Here’s why: there are 9,740 sites linking to them, and they have a Google PageRank of 9/10. That’s phenomenal. There are 9,740 sites who link to freetranslation.com because of their free translation service.
Now, I’m not going so far as to republish their metatags for you, but I will say you should drop by their site and see what they have written there. (Also check out Andy Beal’s recent article on metatags) I noticed your metatags could learn a bit from theirs.
Babelfish.com comes up second, but it’s through AltaVista (http://world.altavista.com/). I’m not sure why it works that way – they don’t even rank on the PageRank scale. It must have something to do with being a part of AltaVista…
But if you drop by their natural site: Babelfish.com, you’ll find that their front page is very text heavy. This is a good idea so long as the text is written for both the visitor AND the search engines. Check out this Scott Buresh article for the scoop on SEO friendly site copy.
Also, Babelfish has about 100 links to their splashpage and a PageRank of 6/10. Their metatags are relevant and targeted too. You can see that they KNOW who’s searching for their services and the terms they’ll use.
So that’s the scoop on the industry “big boys.”
Your site is more optimized, as I can see from your title tag, for the term “translation company.” For “translation company” you come up 11th in Google. That’s really where you should focus your attention right now, as you’re more likely to be competitive for that term.
Look at your competitors there for that particular term. See what they’re doing and figure out a fresh twist on their strategies.
Another option is to find a whole new search term to optimize for. Neal Lebar wrote an article about choosing keywords for the pay-per-click search engines, but the strategy would apply to your search for keywords… It might be that there are translation-related terms being searched for out there that are ignored by the big players in your industry, and unknown to the smaller companies.
Make all the text in your links in the nav bar more specific, and work the word “translation” into as many as makes sense. I’m not sure how much this helps, only that it does help some.
On another note, consider an e-newsletter. Especially if you can provide a good source of valuable business information for your readers. Start building your email list now, and have your staff members write about globalization, or foreign customs that will give your readers confidence in business. Then post these articles on your site, and submit them to other e-newsletters.
From what I’ve seen though, a list you build in-house, though slow growing, is one of THE most valuable marketing tools.
That’s the drive by SEO review, Christian. Thanks for your question, and let me know if you need any elaboration.
Garrett
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
