17Jun Hopemasike.com & How to Improve your Google Rankings
The recently launched www.hopemasike.com is doing well in Google search rankings. Launched just over two weeks ago, it’s appearing within the first five results in a search for “Hope Masike”. Ditto for a search on her band “Kakuwe”. Searches for Kakuwe band members yield similarly pleasing results. E.g. Searches for Theresa Muteta and Blessed Rukweza give top ten listings for the site.
How did this happen? Here’s my take on it:
Domain Name
Firstly, the domain name is very important in search engine listings. Since this domain is HopeMasike.com Google figures: “DUH, obviously this is an important site about Hope Masike.”
When registering a domain name for your website, bear this in mind. The age of the domain is also important. Older domains have more credibility since a lot of spammers register domains to use for one or two years before they dump them.
Incoming Links
I have in a previous article linked to www.hopemasike.com from this blog which already appears quite highly on Google searches. This definitely helps. The more incoming links a website has the better. The search engine figures that since there are so many other website linking to this one, then it must be more important.
It is worth remembering that if a website like the BBC links to your site, that one link can be worth more in terms of search engine ranking than a hundred links from smaller unheralded websites.
New Content
Although, the Hope Masike site is just one page, it is really fresh content. Search engines love this. The challenge for Hope and Kakuwe is to keep the site updated and expand it to contain more pages.
Unique Content within the Content
A lot of newspapers, websites and blogs, when they write about a star, never mention the band members. I always make it a point to mention band members, venues, managers, etc when I have the information. I know for a fact that while many people will be out there searching for “Hope Masike” who is the band leader, there will be that small fraction that are looking for one band member or the other. When you think of one article, it makes little difference, BUT think of thousands of articles, different bands or different events, over many years and you will easily see how this sort of thing can give you the search engine edge. That’s my version of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail.
Note well
Search engine rankings are very mobile. As new content is posted on the web, sites move up and down. So, I won’t be surprised if I do a search for “Hope Masike” tomorrow and find that the ranking has moved either way. To keep the site ranking highly I need to make sure it’s updated, hope that more people link to it and a few other things which I will talk about on another day.
I’ve applied these methods to artists, but you can apply them to web content for any sort of website- business, sports, politics, etc.
Related posts: