Useless Web Conferencing Service Search Engine Optimization
September 12, 2008 by RS
Web Conferencing Service Search Result
Is Search Engine Optimization necessary for web conferencing service sites?
Is it useful? Is it necessary? Is it possible? what is the best way to optimize your page and get more traffic to your web conferencing company site?
I have been learning a lot about Google domination and backlinking. I wanted to find out how much of all this is true. If I have a web conferencing company website how do I get it to appear in search results on top of the millions of results?
I did a very small experiment to convince myself what everybody is saying is true. If some of the experts are misled and they are misleading all of us, we will be wasting a lot of time and energy on SEO, the time we should be spending on our site adding quality content and quality web conferencing service.
I went to Google and searched for web conferencing. I have the add-on SEO for Firefox to tell me about the site. If you have SEO for Firefox you can find out
#1 | PR: ? | Google Cache Date: ? | Age: ? | del.icio.us: ? | Y! Links: ? | Y! .edu Links: ? | Y! .gov Links: ? | Y! Page Links: ? | Y! .edu Page Links: ? | Technorati: ? | Alexa: ? | Compete.com Rank: ? | Compete.com Uniques: ? | Trends | Cached: ? | dmoz: ? | Bloglines: ? | dir.yahoo.com: ? | Botw: ? | Whois
#No - Number in Google search result - for the keyword that is searched, this site is No 1 out of all the thousands of sites listed.
PR - Google Page Rank - If you download Google toolbar you will be able to see the PageRank of any website. This shows the importance of that website, according to certain specific criteria.
Google Cache Date - This shows when Google last crawled that site. This also gives an indication of whether the site has fresh content.
Age - This shows how old the site is. If the site was created in 2008 this section will show 2008. If the site was developed and first posted online in 2007 this section will show 2007.
Delicious/Yahoo/Edu Links - The number link the site has in delicious. The number of backlinks the site gets from Yahoo. The number of links from educational institutional websites the site has. The edu backlinks are considered more valuable than other things.
In the same way technorati authority and alexa ranking of the site etc. are shown by SEO for Firefox.
Ok I searched for web conferencing and got the following result. You can see the numbers for each of the columns in the screenshot.
Web Conferencing Service
I was really surprised by this result. None of the results proved what I had already heard everyone say about Google domination.
For example, let us compare each aspect of these three search results which are no#1, 2 and 3 in Google.
In the search results webconf.net is number 1, conferindia is number 2 and webex is number 3.
In this example you can see the first site has 15 yahoo links, the second one has 250 yahoo links and the third one has 2100 links.
Summary: The site with less yahoo back links is number 1 on Google beating two other sites with more backlinks.
In the same way you can compare the PageRank of the three sites. The site with lower PageRank is number 1.
The site that is number 1 on Google was crawled on Aug 22 while the number 2 and 3 have been crawled on September 4.
Here are first three search results from Google.com.
Web Conferencing Service Search Result
Here you can see number 1 is thinkofit, number 2 is gotomeeting and no 3 is megameeting.
The number 1 site has 4030 links, while GoToMeeting at number 2 has 186,000 backlinks! Immediately after that is number three with 4210 links.
You can also see
- number one site - PageRank 6
- number two site - PageRank 7
- number three site - PageRank 5
Summary: At least as far as these two search results are concerned the sites are not getting their position based on the number of backlinks or the PageRank.
Some Important Points to Think About:
1. In the first case because I am searching from India I automatically get taken to google.co.in and the result I get include an Indian company conferindia and the Indian branch of webex.
I went to google.com and repeated the same search and I got three results that were entirely different.
2. In the first example, the edu links are 0 in all the three sites. In the second set of search results we have the following:
- number 1 - 258 edu links
-number 2 - 140 edu links
- number 3 - 6 edu links
So do edu links count but yahoo links don’t count?
3. I searched for web conferencing. In all the results web conferencing is mentioned once or twice in the title and in the description or the content below the title in the search result.
Of course, it is important to have these words in the title and description if you want to rank for them. But if we look carefully we see all the 10 results have these words in title and description. Only these three sites have got the 1, 2, 3 position. So the credit does not go entirely to having these words in the title and description.
One site that has overdone this ranks 10. This site says:
Web Conferencing | Web Conference | Web Conferencing Service
InterCall is a web conferencing company that provides web conferencing solutions to meet your web conferencing needs.
So this web conferencing company has used the keyword thrice in the title and thrice in the description. That has not helped him to get to number 1.
4. If I search for web conferencing service or web conferencing software I will get an entire different set of results. The sites I have got now may or may not be turn up in search results on the first page. If I am in a different part of the world I may get an entirely different set.
So do these things count in the search results we get?
- Who is searching? From which country? Is there a service within that country to meet the needs of what this person is searching for?
- Why is this person searching? What is this person really looking for? If the person searches for - web conferencing - s/he may find a review of web conferencing services more relevant so thinkofit reviewsite should be listed first. If the person searches for web conferencing service or web conferencing software they are looking for a company that deals with this service or software.
- What happens if more than one site fits in the need for a specific person, specific context? Is the factor how old a site is and how long they have offered this service is given priority?
Is that why in example 1 and example 2 the oldest site comes up on top.
Example 1
Number 1 web conferencing service: Age - 2001
Number 2 web conferencing service: Age - 2004
Number 3 web conferencing service: Age - 2006
Example 2
Number 1 web conferencing site: Age - 1998
Number 2 web conferencing site: Age - 2004
Number 3 web conferencing site: Age - 2001
5. I searched for webinar reviews and got my site as number 1 both in google.com and google.co.in. Not only that the majority of the links on the first page are mine. Three different sites of mine, my squidoo lens, my mixx or mashable or digg link are listed.
I am happy to see my main site getting number 1 position and the other links getting lower position. But how is this part decided as to which one should be on top when I am competing with myself? I would prefer the traffic to directly come to my site rather than go to squidoo and come from there. I wouldn’t want to risk losing them because they are more clicks away from my site and there will be more distraction at these different places they land.
6. With Google Chrome, Google Reader, iGoogle and so on Google is trying to close in on who is searching and why. This is going far beyond country specific search, local search to personal individualized search.
What do you think will make our web conferencing service website come up in more and more personalized search?
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