The following is a paid review of Apogee Search, based out of Austin, Texas.
Five years ago you could have asked me to analyze a website and I would have drafted up an analysis based on usability, functionality and stickiness. My scorecard had little to do with SEO, and was based on a mix of criteria ranging from Flander’s Web Pages That Suck to simply validating the source code via the W3C’s validation tools.
However, today when I analyze a website I go straight to the search engine-friendliness; I’m all about the SEO you know? So where was the first destination for me when I landed at the Apogee Search website? The sitemap page. Why? Because this page is where us SEO’s exploit our targeted keywords; almost like a blatant list of all the search terms a website is competing for.
Ironically enough, Apogee didn’t test their site in IE6 so this is how I initially viewed their sitemap:
Then I remembered that my nifty real-time backlink/ranking checker (free at WebmasterBrain.com) was installed in Firefox, so I opened the sitemap page in FireFox and was surprised at the results.
As it turns out these guys really do know what they are doing, at least in terms of SEO. Many of the terms they were targeting were big-hitters (hard to compete against) and they actually ranked quite well for most of them. Check out the screenshot below.
The interesting part is that they are not following most of my Top 10 SEO Tips, such as using text-based navigation and heading tags. However, they have hundreds of one-way links (not exchanges) pointing to their website from all over the internet. So Apogee may have a fantastic implementation strategy for the acquisition of 1-way links, not necessarily the best on-page optimization practices.
Paid inclusion isn’t necessarily SEO, it’s more of an “SEM thing”. However, they are using many of the best SEO practices, such as using a sitemap.xml, robots.txt, static sitemap page, keyword prominence in the title tag, etc. Based on the extremely high PageRank and number of top positions this site has earned, I give Apogee Search 4 out of 5 stars. I see room for improvement in the 90’s style embossed logo, browser compatibility and on-page SEO best practices.
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