Connections - September 2009 - 12

Passionate Calling To promote the recyclables, Lacey didn’t fiddle with pay-per-click advertising. Instead she built a low cost, intuitive Web site designed to rank high on key word searches by focusing on by-the-book Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) essentials. She made her domain name reflect the keywords of her site. Then she modified the site’s content to match the key words on every page and used natural language—not beefed-up jargon—so it would be more intuitive for researchers to find her content. Lacey also avoided swindling search engines with invisible text. Invisible text is an outdated procedure that Lacey explained as such: “Say you sold aspirins. If you put Bayer Aspirins in invisible text all over your Web site, you’re trying to trick the search engines. If someone is trying to find Bayer Aspirins, you’d think they’d stumble on your site,” said Lacey. That’s not so. Traffic will vanish from the search engine and the Web site will be banned. Invisible text used to be popular in the mid to late 90s, but search engines have gotten wise to them. She learned, “link farming doesn’t work, either.” Link farms are a form of spamming the index of a search engine. The process is derived from paid, automated programs. “If The Secret to Lacey’s Success you do fake links, or link farms you’ll be downgraded on the search engine,” Lacey said. Lacey advocates link exchanges instead, the practice of adding links on your site, and having another company add your link to their site. It’s a way to use “free, grassroots strategy to bump up your site on the search engines,” said Lacey. She’s added more than 40 reciprocal sites to Close the Loop including Freecycle, Dolphin Blue and Green Uses for Waste. The result? She’s one of the top 10 on Google for keywords searches like “close the loop,” “rubber mulch,” and “cocoa shell.” 12 | Connections | September 2009

Connections - September 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Connections - September 2009