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What you are about to read here may be the least known fact about the Starbucks website but it is somewhat instructional if you are new to search engine optimization. Even if you aren’t new to seo you might enjoy the open letter to Starbucks over a cup of cappuccino or the caffeinated beverage of your choice.I was doing a little research today to try and bring a little consistency to my writing style when using the term Website, which you may have notice I also write website and web site. As part of that research I thought I would do a Google search to see which is used most frequently across the World Wide Web. Â
When I did an exact match search for “website” and the Starbucks site came up I was curious enough to view the link in Google’s Cache mode which among other things makes scanning for words on a page handy because it highlights them. This is what I saw:
What you may have noticed, and what caught my eye right away was that the part that says “These terms appear only in links pointing to this page: website
Want a gauge of just how important the text of links pointing back to your page are? This is it. In fact get ready for this, eight of the top ten results in Google for the term website don’t have the term website anywhere in the text of the landing page.
The other day I watched a little video where Matt Cutts, the SEO spokesperson for Google, suggested to Starbucks that from an SEO perspective “Starbucks Homepage” might not be the greatest title. At the time I thought it was funny that he was busting their chops and wondered what else he thought they needed in their title. I now have some suggestions. Here is my open letter to the Internet marketing team at Starbucks.
Dear Starbucks Internet Marketers,
Perhaps you have already heard from Matt Cutts that you have some search engine optimization issues. I am sorry to say, at least when it comes to optimizing for Google, this is quite true. It appears that you don’t rank in Google’s top ten results for the terms espresso, cappuccino or french roast. I haven’t had time to verify more terms, but based on this sampling I suspect that you also don’t rank in the top ten for numerous other caffeinated beverages for which you are so famous, though rest assured that you do have a top ten placement for both the terms coffee and website.Â
What can you do about this, well Matt seems to think that you have squandered an opportunity with the title tag on your homepage. You really might consider replacing the word Homepage in that title tag with one or more of the terms you aren’t ranking for. You could take the keyword stuffing route as some do and try Starbucks | Espresso | cappuccino | latte, but this could be considered ethicly questionable by some.   If you prefer the somewhat more subtle route and are really attached to the homepage thing, you could save a bit of it with a title tag like <title> Starbucks the world’s home for Espresso, cappuccino, lattes, and coffee</title>. Either of these might give you a boost and help those who don’t know that you exist on every corner to at least find your website.
That said, if you really want to work some magic (and if you’re tired of not showing up for logical keyword terms while showing up for irrelevant ones), you might have Jim or Howard ring up Sergey or Larry and ask them to fix their search engine algorithm which is turned up too high for anchor text links and not high enough for other factors like website theme, on page text etc.
Finally, if Jim and Howard are just too busy to sit down for a cup of coffee with Larry and Sergey, or vice versa, you could always consider asking some of the owners of the 163,000 links to change their anchor text. Clearly many of these sites are pointing back to your site with something like “Starbucks Website” in their anchor text. I bet for a 50 cent cup of coffee many of them would be willing to change the text in the link. I am pretty sure that Google wouldn’t consider this link buying, though you might want to check with Matt on this one. I am just throwing out this caveat because you would clearly be trying to manipulate their search engine, but really only in a way that would help Google and the website owners who actually want to rank for the term website, and of course you might also benefit in some small way.
Sincerely,
David Westbrook
Dew Point Productions
cc: Owners of the Other Top Ranking Sites for “Website”
President of the United States
Hillary Clinton
Choice Hotels
Subway
McDonald’s
Super 8 Motels
