Search Engine Differences
As I work to improve my understanding of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a topic that Robert Scoble in particular likes to explore is the difference in results that can occur between the primary search engines. My primary source for experimenting is the soccer blog that I maintain, SGFsoccer.com, that is focused on high school, club and college soccer in the Ozarks area around Springfield Missouri.
I decided I’d try an experiment associated with the recent NCAA College Cup games that were hosted in St. Louis at St. Louis University (SLU). These games are the “Final Four” of college soccer and the primary branding for the games is “College Cup”. My goal is to see if I can rank high in searches for “College Cup Photos”. I chose that route since I was granted an NCAA press pass for the games (woo hoo) and that is my primary outlet for sharing the experience of attending the games with the Springfield Soccer area.
I took two primary steps. The first was to title the three stories I wrote with “College Cup” in the title. On Monday November 27th I wrote a short article highlighting the upcoming games. On Friday December 1st, I wrote a brief article noting that the games had been postponed due to the weather. Both of these used “College Cup” in the title of the article as well as in the body. Then on Saturday and Monday, for the two days of games, I used “College Cup Photos” in the title while including the name of the teams involved as well, anticipating searches such as “College Cup photos UCLA”.
The second step I took was to label each of the 98 photos I uploaded to my Flickr account in a similar fashion as the game day articles. I also created a set and titled it NCAA College Cup Photos.
The final step is to track the results in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. I use Internet Explorer v7 on a new PC with the Live Toolbar installed so it’s a simple effort to enter my search term and then discover the results for the three engines. I added the competitive engines via a simple one-click process that Microsoft includes in the Live Toolbar set up.
I finished uploading the photos around 1am Monday December 4th after returning to Springfield MO from St. Louis and did the initial search when I came into the office around 10am today. The results for “College Cup Photos”?
- Yahoo has me ranked #1 and points to a photo from my Flickr photo set!
- Microsoft ranks me on the 3rd page and points to my November 27th article
- Google ranks me on the 9th page but points to my World Cup 2006 category listing
An interesting sidenote is that Yahoo also points to another Flickr site with a single photo pointing to the College Cup.
