Help:Search Engine Optimization

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See also Search engine optimization (SEO) for a general discussion of SEO.

This page in a nutshell:

Content created in MyWikiBiz has a way of showing up toward the top of search engine results.

MyWikiBiz contributors enjoy the effects of MyWikiBiz Search Engine Optimization. MyWikiBiz listings that utilize semantic tags achieve higher rankings in search results, through a combination of relevance and linkage.

Actual examples

Here's a selection of some actual cases of random Internet users finding their way to a page on this site.

• A Yahoo! search for economics industrial age ranks the very short, nothing-fancy MyWikiBiz article about Industrial Age as the #2 result out of over 20 million.

• Someone in Arizona searched Google for andrew lande and clicked the MyWikiBiz bio about him at the top (#1) of the 544,000 results.

• Someone in Virginia searched Google for liz cohen photography and chose Cohen's MyWikiBiz page from the top (#1) of over 2.4 million results.

• Someone in the Philippines searched Yahoo! for who conceptualize the idea of differential calculus and chose a paper that Jon Awbrey keeps on his MyWikiBiz Directory page. It was #1 out of 34,600 results.

• Someone in Nebraska searched Google for "shit on your neighbor" card game. Fortunately, they found MyWikiBiz as the #3 search result, thanks to Wikipedia deleting a version of this article from their encyclopedia.

• Another Californian had an unusual Yahoo! search for farthest coordinate from the prime meridian in longitude and chose MyWikiBiz at the #3 spot, rather than Wikipedia in the #5 spot.

• This one is beautiful. Back in July 2008, Wikipedia had an article called Public funding of sports venues. The Wikipediots decided that it didn't belong in Wikipedia. So, we took the content and found a nice, warm home for it here. Today, if you run a Google search for public funding of sports venues, lo and behold, our page is the # 2 result out of 260,000 matches. MyWikiBiz gets the traffic, gives the visitor information they're seeking, and builds our brand. Wikipedia gets nothing.

Earlier testing

October 2009

On the evening of October 26, 2009, we caught Jim Cramer on CNBC's Mad Money, ranting about the frequency of use of the phrase "albeit at lower levels" in earnings reports.

As a lark, we created a page on MyWikiBiz about the phrase. About 18 hours later, it became the #1 result on Google when searching for the phrase in quotes (out of 632,000 hits); and it was #3 when leaving out the quotation marks (out of 2,730,000 hits).

The question is, what would happen if someone made a page about this phrase on Wikipedia? First, would the page get deleted? Second, if not, would it outrank the MyWikiBiz page, and how quickly?

July 2009

As of late July 2008, MyWikiBiz's semantic wiki is about a half-year old with a Google PageRank of 3/10, while Wikipedia's plain wiki is 90 months old and has a PageRank of 9/10.

We're already discovering that on certain searches, though, MyWikiBiz has the potential to beat Wikipedia:

Liz Cohen owns search results

Consider the search terms Liz Cohen born Phoenix. In a Google search, we found Liz Cohen's MyWikiBiz page perched at result #2, while Wikipedia's page about her came in as result #7.

The situation on a Yahoo! search was even better -- MyWikiBiz comes in as the #1 result. Wikipedia is not even found in the first 100 page results, except for false positives on articles about Freddie Mercury and Tanya Donelly.

What is Wikipedia's problem? We surmise that because Wikipedia frowns on (in fact, it forbids) the subject of articles adding "sticky" content (like videos, sound clips, images, advertising, and those all-important semantic tags) to their pages, the big encyclopedia actually loses the search engine race when the topic is a less-notable subject.

Examples from our past (on Centiare.com)

Here's an example we noticed in December 2006:

CLS window depicting "Wisdom"

The Church of the Loving Shepherd is located in West Chester, PA. Assume that you were driving by the church one day, but you only caught a glimpse of the church's full name. Later that day, you might search Google using a pretty common method: entering city + name fragments, which in this case might be the stream-of-thought keyword phrase West Chester church shepherd (because that's all you remembered from your drive-by observation). Click the following link to see the actual result you would get on Google:

Google search for West Chester church shepherd

See how the semantic tags recorded in the Church's MyWikiBiz Directory listing improve not only Google's search term relevance, but also trigger the correct address and contact information to be displayed?

In addition to context and relevance, semantic tags also improve overall rankings through the effect of MyWikiBiz's internal cross-linking. That is, the combination of MyWikiBiz listings, automatically-generated summary reports (at the end of each listing), cross-referenced ASK queries, and (probably) our tolerance of Google AdSense ads, all serve to improve overall search rankings by providing multiple reference points.

The Church's listing on MyWikiBiz was authored only as recently as December 9, 2006. We noticed that the MyWikiBiz listing had jumped to #1 or #2 for the Google search results above, as soon as January 4, 2007 -- less than one month for the Power of MyWikiBiz to impact the Church's SEO. Note, also, that the Church's own website comes up much lower in the search results.

Other fun experiments

Additional proof of these search engine optimization (SEO) results can be found by trying these search queries at Google:

• lowrider performance artist -- -- A MyWikiBiz listing ranks #2 out of 194,000 results
• Littleton graphics stationery -- -- A MyWikiBiz listing ranks #1 out of 20,600 results
• Florida stone crab scientific video -- -- A MyWikiBiz listing ranks #1 out of 126,000 results
• Ellie Rountree -- -- A MyWikiBiz listing ranks #2 out of 13,800 results

The stone crab article in MyWikiBiz took its author about 10 minutes to create, and it now comes up first out of 126,000 Google search results -- even higher than Wikipedia's article about stone crabs. Imagine what careful, dedicated authors of encyclopedic content on MyWikiBiz could achieve.

Two specific test cases

At the end of the first week of January 2007, MyWikiBiz developers created two new "test cases" to explore the dynamic impact of MyWikiBiz on Google search engine rankings for small businesses. We selected two real-life businesses in competitive trades -- plumbing and real estate -- and settled on Superior Plumbing & Heating of Rochester, Minnesota, and Pinnacle Realty Services of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

We drew up what we thought might be some common search engine queries that potential customers of these businesses might input on Google. We checked where each of the companies' own web sites (Superior and Pinnacle) emerged on these hypothetical Google searches. Then, we created MyWikiBiz Directory pages for each company, including no more data or information than could be derived from these companies' existing web sites. Finally, we waited a little more than a month for Google's spiders to crawl MyWikiBiz and appropriately rank these new Directory pages.

Honestly, some of the results were enticingly good, while others were a bit of a disappointment for our very high expectations. Here is the data from the Superior Plumbing & Heating test:

GOOGLE SEARCH TERMS	Rank of corporate web site before MyWikiBiz	Rank of MyWikiBiz Directory page after 5 weeks
plumber zip 55901	None of 152 results	2nd
plumber 55901	11th	8th
"hot water" company Rochester MN	175th	41st
"drain cleaning" Rochester MN	16th	20th
superior plumbing	4th	9th
superior plumber	2nd	6th
superior plumbing & heating	2nd	11th

And here is the data from the Pinnacle Realty Services test:

GOOGLE SEARCH TERMS	Rank of corporate web site before MyWikiBiz	Rank of MyWikiBiz Directory page after 5 weeks
realtors 02740	69th	6th
realtors zip 02740	Not in top 300 results	13th
"se habla espanol" "real estate" "New Bedford"	15th	2nd
pinnacle realty services	3rd	13th
realty Bristol Plymouth counties	53rd	160th

As one can see from these tables, MyWikiBiz (even in its formative stages of content-building) has the capability of giving small businesses another "chance" within Google searches to be found by prospective customers. This is especially true if one carefully targets some highly-specialized searches that might be taking place (as in the "se habla espanol" example). Why would Pinnacle Realty Services settle for a 15th-place ranking of their home page on that search, when they could achieve a 2nd place ranking with an equivalent MyWikiBiz listing?