OK let’s see what’s at stake on Google for the phrase “Botswana Travel” and we’ll check to see how the government websites in the nation of Botswana are doing with the phrase.  We begin by going to the:

Google Keyword Tool

and after searching on Botswana Travel and sorting the results alphabetically we get these 4 medium to high value related phrases…

OK so in terms of Global Searches per month we find:

Botswana travel – 27,100

Botswana vacations -14,800

Botswana lodge -12,100

Botswana safari -33,100

and on a related search I found

Botswana tourism – 9,900

OK so what do these Google Adwords numbers mean? The “Global Monthly Searches” is an average of the last 12 months worth of traffic data on the Google ad networks.

all together the 5 phrases above get almost 100,000 searches per month. If you were paying 5 dollars per click for PPC Advertising with Google, you would be spending more than $100,000 a month to get the top percentage of those clicks via Adwords. That’s because out of 100,000 searches you might be lucky to get 20,000 clicks. We can probably get the same number of clicks for free using organic search.

Next factoid – I want to get a feel for the level of competition on that target phrase. I want to see how many pages on the internet that Google knows about that have the word “Botswana Travel” in their title.

I use this advanced operator command in a Google search box:

allintitle:Botswana travel

and Google tells me there are 11,600 web pages it knows about that have those words in their meta title. That’s decent competition but nothing major… big competition is in the half million area and above.

OK lets look at the SERP for Botswana Travel:

1. www.lonelyplanet.com/botswana
2. wikitravel.org/en/Botswana
3. www.botswana.co.za/
4. travel.state.gov
5. www.go2africa.com/botswana
6. www.africaguide.com/country/botswana/
7. www.virtualtourist.com
8. www.worldtravelguide.net/country/38/…/Botswana.html
9. www.botswana-places.co.za/
10. www.sa-venues.com/regions/botswana.htm

Well the government sites did not make the Top 10 Page One Google listings for that important phrase. The top listing is from Lonely Planet and it’s a Google PR6. That’s a lot of PageRank for a single interior web page.

But Botswana Tourism has a PR6 also so they could be a contender for the #1 position if they did their SEO a little differently.

http://www.botswanatourism.co.bw/

Here are their meta tags

<TITLE>:: Botswana Tourism Board ::</TITLE>
<meta name=”description” content=”Official web site for Botswana Tourism Board”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”tourism,botswana,official,site,web,tourist,game,attractions,animals,birds”>

And the phrase “Botswana Travel” does not appear on their homepage anywhere. Neither does the phrase “Botswana Tourism”. So they are getting that phrase just on the inbound links with that phrase and the meta title and the url match.

I checked the phrase “Botswana Embassy” (www.botswanaembassy.org) to see how they ranked for Botswana Travel but it was down… this is what the world was seeing this morning

The following directories must be writable by the web server:
tmp/cache
tmp/templates_c

Please correct by executing:
chmod 777 tmp/cache
chmod 777 tmp/templates_c
or the equivilent for your platform before continuing.

Oh well. When the site is up I will add to this blog post to see how well their meta tags are doing in terms of SEO.

Now look at the power of their main “government portal” a HUGE PR7  http://www.gov.bw/ Now that’s the kind of SEO power that can be used to gain whatever phrase they want.

The Botswana Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a solid PR5 and it’s at http://www.mofaic.gov.bw/ but it’s responding so slowly it took a minute on broadband to see the HTML under the homepage from the New York area. When it appeared I found this as the meta tags for the homepage of their 2nd most government website:

<title>Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation – Home</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Joomla – the dynamic portal engine and content management system” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Joomla, joomla” />

Wow. The critical description tag says “Joomla – the dynamic portal engine and content management system”. That’s unfortunate. There was no attampt at SEO on this page apparently. If they used that powerful PR5 for some targeted SEO they could be getting thousands and probably tens of thousands of additional clicks per month for lucrative phrases that would absolutely help their countries economy.

The Century Cafe and Bakery was near a corner of one of the busiest intersections in Chinatown, on Bowery near Grand, and 1 block from the 2nd busiest subway stop in the neighborhood. Perfect location really and their storefront and fantastic product line did all their advertising for them. Classic brick and mortar story, build it and they will come. But being in the heart of Chinatown and featuring American and Chinese styled bakery products, the Century Cafe wanted a way to break more into the mainstream and compete along side the big boys. That’s where Mal Milligan stepped in and built them a website and worked it for SEO.

Mal started by taking 1100 photos using a Nikon D-60 SLR and 3 Nikon lenses. With 15 years of professional Photoshop experience, he cut the photos down to around 100 and cropped them and tweaked them for the website. He created a WordPress website using a Studio Press Theme and the magic began. The pictures became an instant success on Google images and Flickr. And more and more people started finding Centurycafe.com in Google, Yahoo, and Bing searches. The phrase “That’s the best food photograph I’ve ever seen on the internet” became common at the office when Mal showed off his latest web design project.

In the summer of 2009, centurycafe.com became the #1 Google ranked result for the phrase “Manhattan Bakery” and the business has never looked back. The website is getting more than 3,500 unique visitors a month consistently and it’s getting listed on Google Local and seen during searches up to 7,000 times a month now by local New Yorkers. What a difference, to go from no website to 40,000 unique visitors and 50,000 Google local impressions a year! It’s increased their exposure out of the local Chinatown community and into the mainstream. Now besides being known as the best Chinese bakery in town, they are known as the best bakery in Manhattan by many more more people that would have never known they existed if it were not for Web Design Workplace and their custom websites integrated with SEO.

The competition on Google for the phrase “Manhattan bakery” is serious major leagues for a medium sized multi-million dollar business. Google reports over 6,000 web pages it’s aware of that have the phrase “Manahttan bakery” in their title. To be honest it’s a little bit lucky to get a #1 ranking on Google but it generally takes a lot of hard work and adherence to the SEO best practices guidelines we commonly refer to as “White Hat SEO”.

In this case Web Design WorkPlace put the icing on their cake. The internet exposure has turned out to be very valuable and a lucrative return on investment for the owners. Another NYC web design success story for Mal Milligan and his firm Web Design WorkPlace.