The keyword I selected is one that is near and dear to my heart: shoes. Upon Googling shoes, the first company to appear at the top of the page is shoes.com. Right off the bat you can decipher that one of the reasons this particular company shoots to the top of the charts is because of the mention of the word "shoes" on its main page of its Web site. The word is mentioned more than 30 times on the site, including a "Top Searches" section which includes 19 mentions of the word (women's shoes, men's shoes, kids' shoes, etc.).
The company that appears on the fourth page is Dillard's. Compared to shoes.com, the word shoes is only mentioned once on the main page of Dillard's. Additionally, as you dig deeper into the site by clicking on the "shoes" link, the word still only appears twice. Because Dillard's is a department store offering a wide range of products for consumers, it isn't surprising that it appears farther down on the search list.
When searching "http://www.shoes.com", more than 12 million sites mention/link site on the Web, and more importantly, these links, in addition to mentioning the site, often mention our keyword "shoes." The site is mentioned in blogs, on other shopping sites, such as pricegrabber.com, and business.com -- all of which help to build the power of this particular site. Dillard's on the other hand is mentioned about half as many times. As noted in Rand Fishkin's Beginner's Guide to SEO, search engine optimization includes what he terms "stage four" where major search engines such as Bing and Google take into account the number of links a company has to other external sites (Fishkin, 2005). Because shoes.com is mentioned so often, the web spiders or "crawlers" scour the external sites and find that the company's site is linked to many other Web sites, so that in turn pushes it further up the list. Anchored text would be included as well since many blogs may refer specifically to shoes.com. In the case of this blog, my reference to Fishkin's guide would be an example. Mark Glaser agrees, noting that providing inbound and outbound links "enhances site visibility" (Glaser, 2008).
Tying into the previous paragraphy, Fishkin also discusses the idea of community when building or enhancing SEO. As social media continues to grow, so does the opportunity to for companies to help move their site higher in SEO rankings. For example, as consumers use Facebook and other blogs to discuss products, search engines pick up on the mentions made via these social networks. Both Dillard's and shoes.com promote the same social networking pages -- Facebook and Twitter. Dillards has less than 400 fans and shoes.com boasts more than 2,000 fans, so one could assume that because there are more fans on shoes.com's page, the company gets more mentions via sites such as Facebook.
When searching for the same keyword on Bing and Yahoo, shoes.com still appears at the top of both lists. However, Steve Madden now shows up on the fourth page of the search on Bing, while Macy's now appears on the fourth page of the Yahoo search. When using Ask.com for my search, I got completely different results for both pages. Appearing first on the page of Ask.com is Zappos.com, while an article on walking shoes comes up on the fourth page. I guess this is where my confusion really sets in -- why do different search engines turn up totally different results? I understand that companies play a major role in determining where they fall in the rankings, but if they are doing all of the "right" things, then why is it that they appear in different spots in the rankings?
References:
Fishkin, R. (2005, Dec. 5). Beginners guide to SEO. Retrieved January 18, 2010, from http://www.seomoz.org/article/bg1
Glaser, M. (2008, April 30). Nine tips to improve search engine optimization (SEO). Retrieved January 21, 2010, from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/04/9-tips-to-improve-search-engine-optimization-seo121.html
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