BEST SEARCH STRATEGY: RetailMeNot
Building a fancy new website worth thousands of dollars won't be worth the effort if users can't find it. Understanding search marketing is a key component of any successful website, which is why coupon retailer RetailMeNet records monthly web traffic of 10 million unique browsers and
22 million page impressions.
The site, which has achieved huge success in the US, is essentially a huge directory of coupons for large retailers including Domino's Pizza, Amazon.
com and Victoria's Secret.
Category judge James Thomson, editor of SmartCompany, says the site search optimisation is almost faultless.
"For example, take its amazing Google numbers - a Google page ranking of 6, almost 2.5 million pages indexed by Google and an impressive
317,161 inbound links," he says. "But the real secret here is content - there's just so much of it, it's all extremely relevant to the community and it's all brilliantly optimised for RetailMeNot's keywords."
But co-founder Guy King says RetailMeNot has achieved search marketing success by ignoring practically every other method tried by rival websites.
"SEO is bullshit. Our philosophy is to focus on pages that are as useful as possible to as many people as possible. Basically this is due to our belief that Google is smarter than we are, so we're better off spending our time building good products rather than abusing the system."
"Out strategy is really just going against traditional strategies. One of the key metrics of a good website is time on site, but we are trying to get that figure down as much as possible. We want people to find what they're after as quickly as possible."
