Volunteer Basic Guide to SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SpaceShare has a high google ranking, but when people search for "carpooling" and "festivals" they previously didn't wind up at our site. One of the key ways that Google determines rank when searching for a keyword is the quantity of links pointing at your site with keywords in the link text.

So a link like
SpaceShare
says to Google: SpaceShare is an important site, especially for people searching for the word "SpaceShare." This doesn't do us much good (we're going to be #1 by a very wide margin for anyone searching for spaceshare).

Much better would be
Carpool or rideshare to a festival or conference
says to Google: SpaceShare is an important site, for people searching for words like "carpool" and "festival"

When blogging about SpaceShare and generating links back to our site, you don't have to go crazy or create weird looking links, but
SpaceShare carpooling and green travel
is vastly better than
SpaceShare carpooling and green travel.

It's generally helpful to use this same approach when linking to outside sites, see the images:

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Our Keywords

Any combination of carpool, rideshare, roomshare ... with [s] or [ing]
PLUS
Conference, festival (secondary: convention, meeting, wedding)

Specific choice: we often do better with "rideshare TO festivals" ... and will likely decide to lock on to one or two of those phrases and make sure we're number one, so we can tell people to google "rideshares to festivals" and know they're get us.

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Specifics on July 17, 2009
ridesharing to festivals: #1, #2 is our video.
rideshare festival: #10
roomshare conference, conference roomsharing: X. Google is picking up specific events.
share a hotel room, conference: #2 is a blog Stephen did

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