#1 on MSN (and other SEO thoughts)
I never thought I’d say this, but today, I love MSN (Scoble, you listening?). After only two months, NetworthIQ is now #1 on MSN for both the keywords, net worth and the phrase “net worth”. MSN has consistently been our biggest traffic driver. I’d also like to rank highly for personal finance, but that’s a much more crowded space. So, for now net worth is the primary target.
Where’s google and yahoo? Don’t ask. They’re definitely behind the times ;-). I believe we’re too new at this point to rank highly there. I’m anxious to get a PageRank and see what happens then. Is there a sandbox effect happening? Tough to tell because we’re definitely indexed in both and come up fine in direct networthiq searches.
We maintain a simple (but effective, IMO) SEO strategy for NetworthIQ:
- Create lots of content that is updated frequently. Well, we don’t directly create it. Our users take care of that part. Every time a public profile is created we have a new indexable page and the home page and listing pages change/expand. All of this requires no additional effort on our part.
- Produce clean, standards based pages, that are easy to index. Minimize markup, and place all script and style blocks in external sources.
- Make clean URLs that are easy to navigate. (We use ISAPI Rewrite, but why does Microsoft not put this into IIS? I could give my opinion on that, but since I’m liking MSN today I won’t knock Microsoft.)
- Focused titles and headings
- Encourage backlinks by both being a fun new app, and by opening up public profiles so that users link directly to their profiles. We’re working hard to take advangtage of Blog Power when it comes to SEO.
If you received the newsletter you’ll know that we’re working on entries/comments and for a user’s profile, which if utilized, has the possibility of exponentially increasing the indexable content.
One area for improvement is to update titles to move NetworthIQ to end of the title tag, thus highlighting the keywords earlier. Also we should encourage backlinks to use “net worth” in the anchor text (i.e. NetworthIQ - Track, Share and Compare your net worth or Track, Share and Compare your net worth with NetworthIQ, or something like that), but you can’t always control that, and it gets to be a little wordy. Plus, we’re grateful for any link regardless of anchor text.
Have any other SEO suggestions? I’d love to hear them.
September 15th, 2005 at 2:01 am
I wouldn’t worry too much about Google and Yahoo. They don’t like new sites, but traffic from them will start picking up eventually (sometime over the next few months).
In the mean time, there’s not much you can do but keep writing content, and enjoy the MSN traffic.
September 18th, 2005 at 7:59 am
I just signed up. A big part of my portfolio is stocks sold short. I put the stocks down as “other debt” and the cash received as “cash”. There are other ways to account for this, but I guess that makes sense. And I did a rough split out of mutual funds between stocks and bonds for those which are invested in both. I can break down the retirement accounts along those lines but just lumped it all under “retirement”. Ands “personal property”, is that value of household goods and other stuff or what? I wouldn’t count as part of net worth usually, so I put zero.
Over time I guess this will become more sophisticated and maybe a forum/messageboard to discuss issues would be useful?
September 19th, 2005 at 7:48 am
This is a great start. Some thoughts:
1) Add more detailed asset categories. For example, under mutual funds: large value, small growth, etc…
2) Allow export from Quicken or MS Money to quickly allow users to populate their accounts.
January 20th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
This is an awesome article. I learned a lot of great tips and pointers. Thanks for the information!!