Using PR to get better Google rankings

QUESTION: How can you get to page one of Google for a keyword that’s got 270 million competing pages?

ANSWER: Get into Google News.

Last year we launched a 100% ‘green’ web hosting service. This means you could be certain that the energy used to power the server on which your website sits is powered 100% by wind, sun and rain. The only way we could do this was by acquiring a dedicated server based offshore - in this instance, in California. UK alternative sources of energy are still too unreliable to guarantee 100% ‘green’.

Our problem was that keywords like ‘green hosting’ and ‘google green’ have respectively, nearly 80 million and 270 million competing pages. Getting a top ranking would be tough.

Then we remembered that Google  uses a website’s international IP address as one of its geographic ranking factors. In other words, if a site is hosted outside of the country in which it wants to be found, a UK site hosted in the US for example, Google would regard it as less relevant than a site hosted in the UK. It would therefore give the site hosted outside the UK a lower ranking in its UK search results.  So we emailed Google to ask whether they’d reconsider this policy for sites hosted on servers powered 100% by alternative energy.

Answer came there none which suprised us as Google likes to make a big thing about its eco creds. It’s even getting into the green energy business.

So last week we issued a press release about Google’s apparent confusion.

The result was that today we’re on the first page of Google for ‘green hosting’, ‘google green’ and other related key-phrases. That’s because Google shows results from Google news on its first page and bless their cotton socks, they haven’t penalised us for having the audacity to question their policy.

The moral of the story is that if you can find a newsworthy angle, you can beat the competition provided you know how to optimise your press release for Google and the other search engines.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Marketing Services, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.