Off-Page SEO Case Study
I haven’t done a case study in a while now, so I thought I’d do another one. What I want to do this time is focus on off-page search engine optimization. When you’re trying to influence your search engine rankings, you can group the things you can do into two categories: changes you can make to the page itself (on-page) and changes you can make to other pages (off-page).
Most SEO techniques are on-page techniques: choosing a good title (perhaps the one thing you totally control that most influences where your pages shows up in the search engine results), keyword density, etc. And for AdSense publishers these techniques also lead to better ad targeting, so there’s a double whammy of benefits in doing on-page SEO.
At some point, though, you can’t do anything more to the page itself, which is where the off-page factors come into play. Or maybe you can’t change the page at all, meaning off-page is all you can do anyhow.
To make this case study fair, I’m going to use some pages from a site that I don’t control and don’t directly make me any money. The site is the Sybase site. Sybase is my employer and I think some of its pages could use a boost in the search engine results. So let’s see what I can do to help. Maybe I’ll fail miserably… that’s why these case studies are so exciting 
Choose Your Targets
The first thing I need to do is select the individual pages I want to influence. Search engine results are all about placements of pages, not sites.
If you’re selling things, the first pages you should look at are those that describe your products and services. Sybase has many products, most for enterprises (geektalk for large companies), and I’m going to focus on three of them: SQL Anywhere, RFID Anywhere, and Mobile Office. I’ve worked on all three products and so they’re special to me in that way.
The very first thing to do is see how well the product names rank in Google. You want your products to be in the top 10 if possible, ideally in the first one or two spots. Right now, this is what I see:
* SQL Anywhere — ranks #1 for sql anywhere and “sql anywhere”
* RFID Anywhere — ranks #1 for rfid anywhere and “rfid anywhere”
* Mobile Office — ranks #12 for mobile office and #11 for “mobile office”
SQL Anywhere and RFID Anywhere have ideal placements for their product names, but Mobile Office needs some work. The term “mobile office” is much more generic, so it’s not surprising that Mobile Office isn’t in the top ten… yet.
Going Beyond Product Names
Product names are the obvious things to target, but you’ll also want to target other keywords. Finding those keywords can be a challenge, but there are some great free tools you can use to help you along the way.
Take the SQL Anywhere product, for example. It has a 70% share of the mobile database market (it’s database software that can be run on mobile devices like laptops, BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile handhelds, and so on) but it doesn’t even rank in the top ten for the term mobile database, though it does squeek in at #10 for “mobile database”. So there’s one obvious keyphrase to work on.
If you’re not sure which keywords to target, spend an afternoon with the AdWords keyword tool. Start by taking the URL of each page you’re interested in and seeing what the keyword tool thinks of the page. You’ll quickly put together a list of relevant keywords, some of which may surprise you. You can’t do them all, though, so you’ll have to prune the list and find just a few — maybe three or four — to concentrate on.
More about list gathering next time…
