Case Study – Visibility in SERPs

Rank is how well positioned a particular web or blog page appears in search engine results. Rank and position affect your click-through rates and, ultimately, conversion rates for your landing pages.

If you can not afford then there is no need to spend money on fancy software or SEO experts for search engine optimization. Some basic SEO practice could put your site on the first page of search pages.

We view our site stats for recent hits a couple of times a day. We are pleased to find at these random checks that our website or blog pages have been ranked 1 to 10 by Tier I Search Engines as well as others for various keyword phrases.

We use Bravenet Hit Counter to monitor our web traffic:

From time to time we publish our site and blog visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) as case studies. These are actual search results randomly found by us.

In today’s case study we will show how 2 of our blog pages ranked first on Google search on June 30, 2011.

Procedure

First we check the Referrers / Recent Hits in Visitor Analysis by Bravenet. We click if we find a Referring URL from any search engine that takes us to the search engine result page (SERP). We find the Search Phrase, Search Page, and Rank of our site. Google uses cached page to match search key phrase. We analyze the Cached page so that we could further improve our website or blog pages.

Case Study 1

Blog Page: Acid Reflux Natural Cure Video
Referring URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=acid reflux video barton&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-S… Jun 30, 2011 07:19:39 PM
Date: Jun 30, 2011
Search Phrase: acid reflux video barton
Rank: 1 of about 1,290,000 results

Source code of the cached page reveals whether the meta tags are properly optimized:

<title>Acid Reflux Natural Cure Video | GoldenTwine Blog</title>
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp,noydir" />
<meta name="description" content="If you or someone you love suffers from painful heartburn, GERD or acid reflux then this could be the most important article you've ever read. Because Barton Publishing is blowing the whistle on the big drug companies by revealing simple home remedies that cure acid reflux without expensive prescription or over the counter drugs." />
<meta name="keywords" content="acid reflux,Barton Publishing,cure,heartburn,home remedy,natural cure video,natural remedies,natural treatment,remedy report," />
<link rel='canonical' href='http://www.goldentwine.com/blog/acid-reflux-natural-cure-video' />
<link rel='shortlink' href='http://wp.me/pPMoR-vK' />

Case Study 2

Blog Page: ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 Official Theme Song
Referring URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=icc world cup official theme song hindi&btnG=Googl… Jun 30, 2011 07:16:05 PM
Date: Jun 30, 2011
Search Phrase: icc world cup official theme song hindi
Rank: 1 of about 729,000 results

Source code of the cached page reveals whether the meta tags are properly optimized:

<title>ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 Official Theme Song | GoldenTwine Blog</title>
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp,noydir" />
<meta name="description" content="ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 Official Theme Song is composed by the Indian popular music trio of Shankar, Ehsaan, and Loy. The lyrics of the song have been written by Manoj Yadav. De Ghuma Ke will also be dubbed in Bengali and Sinhalese as India is co-hosting the event along with Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The song has been marketed by Ogilvy and Mather." />
<meta name="keywords" content="2011 cricket world cup,Bangladesh,de ghuma ke,hindi version,icc 2011,India,music,official cricket song,official theme song,sports,Srilanka,video blog post," />
<link rel='canonical' href='http://www.goldentwine.com/blog/icc-cricket-world-cup-2011-official-theme-song' />
<link rel='shortlink' href='http://wp.me/pPMoR-up' />

Conclusion

Simple search engine optimization of your web pages or blog articles may result in high rank for your site in search engine result pages as could be seen in these two case studies.

We would also like to discuss Google +1 that was introduced in Google search globally late last month.

You may now recommend a page on Google search pages publicly by clicking the +1 button that appears next to search result titles.

But you will find it missing in the second screengrab above. That is because you need to log in to your Google account then only you will see the +1 button. The screen grab below was taken after I logged in to my Google account:

The +1 button is gray as I have not yet +1’d publicly. When you +1, the +1 button will turn blue, and you’ll see a message confirming your +1: You +1’d this publicly. Undo. See below:

If you click Undo, your +1 will be undone and the button would turn gray again.

But how could you +1 a site on Google search pages before you have visited the site? Secondly, if one is careless about the colour code (blue means you have +1’d), one may undo a +1 given earlier as you are not warned.