Creta Farms and Creta Farm pose an interesting optimization problem. Creta Farm, www.cretafarm.gr, is a long established Greek company, and long established site. Creta Farms, www.cretafarms.com is a brand new American company that is going to the American market uses similar products and techniques. The site is also brand new. On searches, the Greek site routinely comes up first, whether “Creta Farm“, or “Creta Farms” is placed into the search engine. (For purposes of this article I have used Google.) The sell gourmet deli meat that replaces that animal fats in the meat, (Turkey, Ham, Bologna, and Roast Beef) with extra virgin olive oil, EVOO. While the companies are related, it is desired that in the U.S market, searches of “creta farms” (plural) returns the US site, www.cretafarms.com. Currently the cretafarm.com (Greek Site) comes up first.
As usuaul with sites in the food sector, style is going to take the foreftont over tons and tons of indexable optimized text. Creta Farms has beautiful packaging, and the site uses those same design elements. Those elements however are contructed mostly of gif and jpgs of text that the search engines can’t read. Creta Farm, the Greek site, has more indexable text, but does not use the actual term, “creta farms” plural. Google is making the assumption perhaps that creta farm typed into a search engine could mean either creta farm, or creta farms.
In a perfect world I would have the greek site use greek language tags, as I am not sure Google would let a foreign site outrank an English one. (I do not have any access to the Greek site however.) For that matter, I don’t really have that much say on what the US, Creta Farms site does. I can link to it, and I can add tags to it, but the look and feel is put together by the same designers that make the packaging. In largely the same programs. It’s sliced, it’s made into table based html, and that is what I have to work around. A slippery SEO puzzle to be sure!
The workaround in this case is that I turned what was the Creta Farms main US page, and turned it into a user selected launch page. It follows the same package design as the US products, and allows the user, via a map, decide the homepage they go to. U.S site, or Greek site. Those that control the Greek site have agreed to use the same portal. SO, at the end of the day, the end user will get to the creta site that most serves their needs. Still, I would love for the term “creta farms” typed into Goolge, to yield www.cretafarms.com FIRST, before the Greek site. Maybe this linked blog entry will help? Maybe I will get some great suggestions…
Update: 5-9-2008
After several months, “Creta Farms” entered into Google returns the www.cretafarms.com US site as number one! Now on to Deli Meat, Deli Meats, Lunch Meat, Coldcuts, or Cold Cuts and working them all into meaningful copy.
Update: 6-9-2008 Creta Farms Store Locator
I am often asked via this blog, where to find Creta Farms products. So I have included the link below. Enjoy!
http://www.cretafarms.com/consumer/locator.html
