SEO Strategy

Wikipedia gets a lot of Google love. By some estimations Google drives more traffic to Wikipedia than to any other site. Just do some random searches in Google and see how many times a Wikipedia page comes up very high in the results.

So presumably we can learn something about SEO from Wikipedia. According to this article and discussion, What Wikipedia can teach us about SEO, there are a few important things that account for Wikipedia’s SEO success:

1. Wikipedia uses search engine friendly file names, title tags and page descriptions.

2. Wikipedia has a ton of text based content - and, of course, it is very keyword focused.

3. The internal linking between Wikipedia pages is very extensive and very thorough.

4. Wikipedia has more than 5 million inbound links, and many (if not most) to internal pages.

This should make Wikipedia a much-copied model for all websites looking for good Google rankings. But the fact is, many marketers - especially those running ecommerce sites - do not appreciate the importance of on-page optimization. They are content to show a picture of a product with a short description and price. But if they were to follow the Wikipedia model they would use keyword-rich titles for all product pages, along with optimized descriptions on every page. They would also inter-link internal  pages - not just from a common navigation bar, but from within the text of pages by using such devices as “Similar products you might be interested in…”

However, as many of us involved in providing SEO services know, many clients are not prepared to go that far. It would take much more than just tweaking their page titles and metatags. It would take a remake of their entire site, involving writing of a lot of text, and actually providing some useful information about the products.

Most prefer to just offload the problem to someone else and spend their money on things like link building. But that is only half the battle. Without decent content it is hard to win at the SEO game.