Shopasaurus Returns
The Shopasaurus, popular 80's icon that has faded into the past.
Funny thing about Web search — not everything shows up just because it’s out on the Web. You’d think that by putting a site up with Saurus characters, that if you searched Google for “shopasaurus” that my little pink dinosaur would appear in the results — not so. Web experts use techniques called SEO (search engine optimization), which get the thing you want people to find to show up higher in the results. But shopasaurus didn’t show up at all. There’s a lot of technical reasons for it, but one thing that helps, is if I post it on this site, which has been around a lot, and has a lot of outgoing links. So here be Shopasaurus, that 80’s icon of excess.
November 12th, 2009 at 5:54 am
Kind of interesting that the top result in Google came from your friend who is a professional SEO guy. Your personal site (http://www.cliffgalbraith.com/) t-shirt site (http://www.saurusgang.com/) and your blog post are on the first page of Google’s results, so you’re very doing well. Anyone searching for “shopasaurus” in context of t-shirts will likely find those.
Also keep in mind that people are more apt to search with more than one term. For “shopasaurus t-shirt” you’re number 2. That’s excellent. “saurus t-shirts” you’re # 1. Make sure you’re testing phrases as well as individual keywords.
Anywho, here’s what else you can do:
- You have multiple sites. Link from those sites to your shopasaurus site.
- You’ve already inadvertently optimized http://www.cliffgalbraith.com/ (#4 or 5 in Google) for “Shopasaurus”, so you definitely should be linking from that page to the real shopasaurus site. Then once the shopasaurus site is close to your personal site, take Shopasuarus out of the title of your personal site to de-optimize it, so the shopping site can rise above it.
- Get links from “expert sites”. Expert sites are well known sites with subject matters related to the keywords that can be found on your site. For you this would include sites/blogs/twitter feeds about t-shirts and 80’s retro.
- Getting a link from a site with lots of outgoing links won’t help you, unless it is an expert site. For instance, my cicada website has about 10,000 outbound links, but a link from there won’t get you much mileage because it’s about bugs. But a link from retrojunk.com — that’s what you want. Same issue with age. Expert trumps age.
- Get a link from a news site. A like from a big trusted news source — CNN — that’s good as gold. This one is pie in the sky, but I wouldn’t put it past you.
You seem to get the basics, like putting the keywords in the title tag, having text content on the page, linking with a text link using the actual word “shopasaurus” so I won’t harp on about that. I would add a meta description too.
Now, ranking #1 won’t guarantee sales. You’ll need to engage in marketing efforts to raise awareness and desire.
November 12th, 2009 at 6:06 am
Looking at Google… looks like “saurus t-shirt” gets more searches than “shopasaurus” in a month. You shop optimize around that as well.