Twins Turn!

I feel like it’s time to give the Twins a turn. As I’ve mentioned before, I look at the Twins website on a fairly regular basis. If a person searches for “Minnesota Twins," the website is number one on the Google search page. If you type in “Twins” on Google, the first three organic results are related to Minnesota Twins baseball. The results are www.twinsbaseball.com, twins.mlb.com and minnesota.twins.mlb.com. Any of the top three results will take a person directly to the Minnesota Twins main website, even though the names of the top three results appear as if they are different. Nice job of optimization going on here. I also found it interesting that the five featured link ads on the search page were completely unrelated to baseball. The paid ads all referred to some aspect of twin pregnancy!

So – what helps the Twins reach the top? For one thing, they have 711,000 linked in websites. Since the Twins are at the top, it is likely that there are a large number of quality external links that include the Twins keywords. It is very important that external links to a website contain specific keywords rather than something like “click here” (Fleischner, page 58).

What else? Located directly on the Twins homepage, I found a message inviting me to start my own Twins Major League Blog and join communities like these: Fantasy 411, Voice from Twins Territory, Michael Cuddyer's Blog, Twins Ballpark Update, and Kelly's Corner. There are five blogs, easily accessible to any visitor. Blogs are a great tool to boost search engine optimization efforts (Fleischner, page 77).

And one more…Google values one-way links above all else (Fleischner, page 57). The best way to attract one-way links is to promote free content (Fleischner, page 89). The Twins website is full of free content. There are plenty of headlines and news articles, a pretty intriguing sweepstakes offer, a chance to vote for All-Star players, and an invitation to have game updates forwarded directly to your cell phone. The options available at the Twins website are diverse and could attract a broad range of visitors. It seems like they are trying to offer something for everyone. Whatever it is that they are doing, it seems to be working! Go Twins!

Oh, and speaking of the Twins, I'll be at Target Field cheering them on this Wednesday and Thursday :)