Google PageRank Case Study Part 2

At various points in their money trading activities, consumers will want to check on the latest currency exchange rates. This is a key point at which companies wanting new customers can reach the market and gain awareness. Either immediately or at some later time, the consumer may decide to switch to a new currency broker. Ranking highly for search phrases such as "currency exchange" or "exchange rates" provides exposure to hundreds of thousands of potential customers from different parts of the economy and distant reaches of the globe.

 

The Power of Links

The three web sites above produced their domination of the search engines by providing a simple currency exchange calculator. They not only placed it on their site, they also offered the service to other web site owners. There are thousands of Web sites that have links to these 3 sites. These inbound links lead to the currency exchange calculators at these sites as a service for their own web site visitors. The calculators are also offered as free content for Web site owners. Free content is a powerful web promotional technique for several other reasons too.

Search engine rankings are heavily influenced by the number and quality of incoming links to a Web site. Most search engines are using some sort of popularity rating system. Even Yahoo is said to be incorporating link popularity into their results.

XE.com, Oanda and X-rates.com are hard to miss if you're searching for anything related to currency exchange as the above chart clearly demonstrates. www.Oanda.com has almost 5500 Web sites linking to it. Click on the Oanda link and you'll see how many web sites this company has on the web, many placed in important web directories. These numerous and key placements are considered important to search engines and further strengthen Oanda's ranking. In fact, ranking ahead of them would be a Herculean task for any optimization expert. The only site that has topped Oanda is XE.com and XE.com is using two sites, xe.com and xe.net to catch even more visitors.

XE.com ranks first for individual words and for full 2 to 4 keywords phrases. The pivotal single word is currency. They can pivot on that word and capture any phrase that includes the word currency. This is due to how the search engines index keywords. A two word phrase is also 2 one word phrases. These sites also have the word currency in the title tags and the pages themselves. The 90 XE.com pages indexed in Google all resonate to the theme of currency exchange which means its "site theme" is clearly focused. The site offers a chance to link to it, and free content people can use on their Web site.

One of the sites that link to XE.com is www.travel.com, a site with some linking power. Notice in the menu, a text link stating "currencies" is the link to XE.com. The search engine treats this link as a big vote for the popularity of XE.com. As well, the link is in a menu that is present in all the Travel.com pages which is an even bigger boost.

Another site linking to XE.com is LogAfrica.com. It's link to XE.com has the words currency conversion near to it. Search engines actually do take this proximity into account. They also look at the "theme" of the page and give it a relevancy score. LogAfrica isn't all that relevant but the link does help XE.com.

X-rates.com has about half of the inbound links the other two have. It did have good placement on more specific currencies such as the peso and the franc. However, since the Euro has replaced many european currencies, X-rates will not be getting the hits they used. With less currencies in money markets, the more intense the competition for the basic search phrases such as "Euro currency rates."

Conclusion

To dominate search engines, you need to have valuable content so other web site owners would be happy to refer their visitors to your web site. Having free content for others a great way to get links. Having multiple Yahoo listings helps and so does a focused web site theme.

These three sites will continue to dominate currency related searches and they'll be difficult to top because they're doing all the right things.

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Professional Search Engine Optimization

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