Take a look at how a shopping search engine Web site ranked for one of the best phrases going in search engine merchandising: dvd players and other niche phrases that bring in well-qualified sales prospects.

The site is kelkoo.com, one of the top shopping search engines in Europe. They have built partnerships and offer a shopping search service for other e-tail sites. These serve a solid foundation for high quality linking.

Kelkoo ranks very well for brand name related keyword phrases. And it does okay on searches for popular phrases. Doing a search on Google for DVD Players, we find the Kelkoo Comparison shopping Web site listed in 7th position. It's not number one, but 7th is not bad particularly because they appear to serve the European/British markets. The page listed is http://audiovisual.kelkoo.co.uk/b/a/c_127701_dvd_players.html.

These are its other rankings:

• 4th for Panasonic DVD Players and 5th for Panasonic DVD Player.
• 1st for Philips DVD Players and Philips DVD Player
• 1st for Sony DVD Players and Sony DVD Player.
• 7th for UK DVD Players and UK DVD Player.

A backlink check of that page (http://audiovisual.kelkoo.co.uk/b/a/c_127701_dvd_players.html.) reveals that 6,450 other Web pages are linking to it (Update: there are now 3900 inbound links). Why would so many pages be linked to it? Advertising. By checking the pages linking in, you'll see an ad box at the bottom of the page. The box contains hyperlinks all leading to that page. Hence its PageRank is 7 (Update: it is now 8. Something new has benefited Kelkoo. It is a link from Google itself, a Google page with a PageRank of 10. That may explain the jump in PageRank.

Kelkoo has a variety of other banner ads all over the web. Normally, advertising shouldn't count toward PageRank but somehow this one has escaped the notice of Google. It's a study opportunity for us and one that works with tremendous results.

If you go to the Kelkoo home page, you'll see that all the key pages listed on the home page have backlinks from Kelco ad boxes. The digital cameras page also benefits from the ad boxes and ranks highly for digital camera phrases.

Kelkoo collects a lot of PageRank by having a large directory containing many diverse products. Merchants pay to be listed in its merchant directory. There is also a free directory listing opportunity and they have an affiliate program. The potential for other Web sites to link to Kelkoo.com is enormous. Here is an example of a site with good content that everyone is drawn to link to.

One server technique they use allows Google to record an inbound. A banner on pchardware.co.uk has a link leading to Kelkoo's ad tracker software which then delivers a dynamically generated page on the topic of video game machines. This is dynamic to static url generation method.

This shows that advertising banners can play a key role in building PageRank. The difference might be in how the page is served to the search engine robot.

Kelkoo then has found a way to drive traffic to its site via selected niche keyword phrases, albeit good ones. However, their rankings for major relevant keyword phrases such as shopping, comparison shopping, shopping online are lagging. They could focus on those phrases with a home page based strategy and see their visits skyrocket. Right now, they're content with the niche phrases, which arguably bring better qualified customers anyway.

Kelkoo has found a way to be successful with search engine marketing. May you enjoy the same success!

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