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Even though I am not proud to admit it, for a while, we were beaten at our own game…and by a non-web marketing company at that! The experience served as an important reminder of how important inbound links are in the world of search engine marketing. Before I go any further, let me set the stage.

One cannot ask for a better environment for testing one aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) than what we encountered. The search engine phrase we will be using in this case study, “triune designs” is pretty obscure, which means that very few competitors will be vying for the top spot. Our competitor (truly in name only) for this case study is Triune Designs. They are a boutique-clothing designer based out of France (Fr.; triune-designs.com). We are Triune Designs, a web-marketing firm based out of North Carolina (triunedesigns.com). Our names are exactly alike, which helps in using the aforementioned specific search engine phrase. Finally, we both purchased our domain name within the span of about six months. This is helpful in our analysis because it removes any advantage for either one of us based on age of the domain name. So far, everything is about as even as you can get in the real world, which allows us to truly study some of the more controllable aspects of SEO.

Triune Designs (USA)
Being knowledgeable of how websites and search engines work, we implemented the basic recommendations on how to optimize a site for the likes of Google and Yahoo. We added our keywords and company description to the meta tags and used “triune” and “designs” as many times as possible within good content. We also used textual-based navigation buttons to allow the search engines to see every page of our website. Finally, we utilized lightweight code to make it easier on the search engines to discern all of our content/keywords. Whether or not you understand what I just said, suffice it to say that we did the things that need to be done to better optimize a site for search engines.

Triune Designs (Fr.)

Meanwhile, our namesake’s mirror image across the ocean did not take advantage of the “hidden” meta tag keywords and they only had “triune” written a couple of times throughout their website. To make matters worse for them, out competitor used image-based navigation, which meant that search engines would only see the first page and nothing else (computers and search engine spiders cannot read images, so they get stuck on whatever page they first land on, which is usually the home page). I would not say all of this was wrong, but Triune’s (Fr.) programming did not help their cause with search engine optimization.

Shocking Results
What all of this means is that we should have had the major advantage and should have been listed first on most of the search engines. So, imagine my surprise when Triune Designs (Fr.) started being listed first! What was happening to cause such a coup? It turns out, they did something very simple, but effective: they utilized inbound links. Inbound links are links on other people’s websites that link to your website. Triune Designs (Fr.), in a major grassroots effort, basically got out there and spread the word in other people’s blogs, websites, and on social networking websites. In doing so, Triune got people talking about them and got others to add links to their website. In the span of about two or three months, they had over 100 links coming into their website. We were way behind them; we only had approximately two inbound links. The resulting effect was that our French clothing counterparts were listed first in just about all of the search engines when using the term “triune designs.”

I constantly tell each our clients about the importance of inbound links. Unfortunately, most of the time, our clients shrug this recommendation off. Going out and adding inbound links is not flashy and is seen by most as too much work for very little gain. However, this case study serves as a valuable and scary reminder of just how important inbound links can be in search engine optimization. If a clothing designer whose website was not set up for SEO can beat a web marketing firm whose site was, just by using inbound links, imagine what can happen if someone takes full advantage of almost all of the recommended techniques!! That would be a very powerful marketing tool, which would be hard to contend with.

Until next time…