Following basic web building best practices and think about our users before the search engines resulted in a great ranking for our new site.

1. How we got NineOrcas.com a top search
rank after just 2 weeks
Getting your business listed on the first page of search engine results for key phrases is
extremely important for any company – but it’s especially critical for a new business like
ours that’s just starting up.
NineOrcas.com has been live for two weeks now, so it’s time for us to check how the
new site is ranking in search engines. We don’t expect much because two weeks isn’t a
lot of time for us to attract links to the
site that will help us catch up to sites that
have been online much longer.
But after checking on a few key search
phrases relevant to our business, I’m
quite happy with how things are
progressing. We have a couple of #1
listings for key long search phrases (for
example, Vancouver Island PR firms)
and we’re steadily moving up the ranks
for shorter, generic ones.
The results are nothing to boast about,
though. Studies show that if your site isn’t listed within the top three results on the first
search results page, you will get very little traffic from search engines. However, I’m
satisfied with how we are doing after such a short time, especially because we haven’t
done anything “special” to boost our ranking — and we never will.
Our philosophy is to grow traffic and search rank organically by providing unique and
interesting information that people find useful. If people find the site useful, the search
engines will follow. We’ve just followed a few basic recommended practices when
building our site that should remove obstacles to us getting a better ranking when we
deserve it.
Here’s what we done so far:
We built the site on a search-friendly content
management system
NineOrcas uses WordPress, which is free open-source blogging software that works well
as a content management system for small, information-focused websites like ours. A
similar platform for bigger sites is Drupal, which Reed at Nanaimo’s Hired Guns wrote
about recently.

2. The WordPress code is clean, simple and complies with the standards of the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C). This is all of lot of technical language, but basically it means
that it has high levels of interoperability across different browsers and devices. Search
engines prefer sites like this because it almost guarantees that their users won’t encounter
problems using them.
We’re using human-readable URLs
You’ll notice that the web addresses on NineOrcas.com use words you can understand.
Our Search and content strategy page, for instance, uses the following URL:
http://nineorcas.com/web-services/search-content-strategy The URL is key-word rich,
which search engines like, and it tells humans what the page is about and where it resides
in the site’s hierarchy. URLs like this are much better for both humans and search
engines than URLs that include random numbers and symbols.
NineOrcas.com tells search engines what we have with a
search sitemap
NineOrcas has two kinds of sitemaps – one for humans and one for search engines. The
search engine version uses the XML sitemaps protocol, which is supported by Google,
Microsoft and Yahoo!
The search sitemap tells the search engines what pages our site has, which are updated
most often, and what we think are most important on the site. Whenever we add new
content to the site, such as when we add this post, our website software notifies the search
engines that we have new content available so that they can index it.
These sitemaps are a major reason NineOrcas is being indexed. Here’s a list of sitemap
generators for websites.
Our social media profiles point to the site
We’re big believers in social media as a way to connect with customers and other
professionals in our field. Social media also has huge benefits for raising your visibility
on the web and in search engines. The two work together. Search engines love social
media because it can tell them what people are talking about and what they find relevant
and interesting.
Before going live with NineOrcas.com, we set up accounts on a variety of social media
services and made sure to point to http://nineorcas.com in the profiles of each one.
That immediately created links to our new domain from high visibility sites.
Our social media focus right now is on Twitter because it’s the most open of the social
networking tools and is being indexed in real-time by both Google and Bing. Our

3. Facebook page is next in terms of importance, but mostly because of its large user base
and less for its search engine benefits.
Other things we’ve done with social media is create a Google Profile, which shows
Google where we’re active on the web. We’re also using Facebook-owned FriendFeed,
which does much the same thing.
There’s still a lot more we plan to do with social media, and all of it will benefit our
website’s visibility.
We hand-crafted search titles and descriptions
Whenever I talk about “search meta content” to clients, their eyes glaze over because it
sounds so techie. But it’s actually pretty simple to understand and extremely important
because:
1. without it your search listings are going to suck, and
2. web developers will often take shortcuts with it because it’s time consuming to do
well.
Meta content is simply information embedded in a web page that tells search engines
what the page is about. The search engines use this information in their search listings.
The two main pieces of meta content are the title and description, and they should be
unique on each page of your site. There are also meta keywords, but these are less
important, although we have used them on many of our pages anyway.
The meta content on each page should accurately describe the purpose and content of the
page. Content management systems often automatically generate meta content, but we
prefer to hand-craft it on small sites like ours.
Doing these few simple things has paid off for us, and they will probably do the same for
you. We still have more to do at a technical level, but our biggest challenge is going to be
keeping the site fresh and interesting.
That’s the same challenge every business faces when it launches a website. Once the
thing is up, you have to continually work at attracting interest.
Originally published on NineOrcas.com