SEO Mauritius

This is just an experiment to see whether I can rank this article for the term "seo mauritius" on google.mu. At the time of writing this article (24 June 2011), the competition is 32,100,000 but if you were to search for “Pages from Mauritius” only, the competition is just 488,000. This is very important in search engine optimisation because the greater the competition, the more difficult it is to rank. Below is a screenshot of the search results:
The keywords, SEO Mauritius, do not get that many searches per month (less than 100 actually) but the idea here is to see how easy it is to get to the top of the SERPs for those terms. It will be easier to rank this phrase for Mauritius pages only rather than the whole web but then again, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge, will it? Let’s take a look at the profile of the first 6 results:

• The 1st result is seomauritius.com probably because it is an exact match domain. The link profile for that domain is not very impressive; 19 external links as reported by Yahoo Site Explorer coming from only 4 distinct domains.
• The 2nd site www.simplysty.com has a more diverse link profile counting to 754 off-page links from 14 root linking domains.
• The 3rd result is twitter which shows the importance of social media marketing.
• The 4th one is www.esolutionsweb.com/search-engine-optimization and as you can see, it is not the homepage but a secondary page of that domain which is considered more relevant. That webpage benefits from 34 links out of which 33 comes from internal linking and only one external link. The homepage itself gets external links from 3 domains.
• The 5th as well as the 7th result are there because of them being exact match domains.
• The 6th result, mauseo.com, has a total of 21 links coming from 3 domains.

This analysis is an important part of the seo process because it will reveal how fierce and competitive the niche is and how much work will be required to enhance the rankings of the website we wish to promote.

A diverse link profile is necessary to get on top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and this can be done by getting backlinks from a variety of sources. The more authority the website where you get the link pointing to your site, the better it will be for you. You can think about authority as how good the website in question is. If you get links for low quality sites, then it might not make a dent in your position on Google when someone searches for a phrase related to your industry. What you need is to get editorial links, which you have neither purchased nor traded, from websites in your very own category.

The important thing to remember is that a website should have great content first and foremost to achieve top rankings in search engines. It’s always been said that you should build your website for your users first and then think about search engine and optimisation and that holds true because the end result of the whole process is to have people like what they see on your site and not have organic traffic from Google to your site only to find that all those visitors are clicking the "Back" button on their browser because you do not have what they’re looking for.

SEO takes time which means it will not happen instantly and once you get the top 3 listing for your chosen keywords, you shouldn’t stop there as your competitors will soon outrank you. So you will need to constantly build links and promote your website to preserve your rankings and stay on top.
Note that Google has geotargeting in place which means searchers from different countries will see different results across the world. This is obviously a good thing because if you live in Mauritius for example, you do not want to see Australian or Canadian websites as they are more likely to be irrelevant to your query. This is why it is important to target the country you’re doing business in when performing your SEO.