What Happens When Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile All Compete for the Same Phrase?

After looking at a cool new application – Trapster – I was directed to Verzion Wireless’s main page to contact them and ask them to add support for the application so that I could use it. When I went to the VZW site I was shocked at what I saw in the title. Was it Verizon Wireless? Nope – instead it looked like a keyword spam filled page that some blackhat seo guru made.

So I decided to do a little bit more work, I opened up AT&T (aka Cingular), T-Mobile and Sprint along side each other.

Here are the headers of each:
Verizon Wireless:

title:Cell Phones, Cell Phone Plans, Cell Phone Accessories – Verizon Wireless

meta name=”Keywords” content=”Verizon, Wireless, Cell, Cell Phone, Mobile, Cellular, Phone, Mobile Phone”
meta name=”description” content=”Verizon Wireless offers cell phones, pdas, devices, cell phone plans, data plans, and accessories with affordable, reliable wireless service for your personal needs.

As you can see – this just looks like a garden variety keyword stuffed title, meta keywords and a meta description that was written by someone who clearly never planned on reading it. Below these meta tags was calls to about 5 .css files and 11 .js files and 2 java script codes. Needless to say – its MESSY!

I was shocked to see that the company name was LAST and not first on a website for a multi billion dollar company.

AT&T:

title: Cell Phones and Cell Phone Plans from AT&T, formerly Cingular Wireless
meta name=”description” content=”Cingular now the new AT&T offers cell phones, cell phone plans and wireless accessories to meet your needs.”
meta name=”keywords” content=”Cell phone, iphone, iPhone, Cell phones, Cell phone plans, Wireless phones, Mobile phones, Free cell phones, AT&T wireless services, AT&T, Cingular Wireless now the new AT&T, Cingular”

Again garden variety spam in the title. The description is definately a lot better than verizons. The keywords I would fine tune a little bit better and I wouldn’t include the phrase “cingular wireless now the new at and t” as a meta keyword. AT&T also included some raw CSS code in the header instead of just making a .css file and calling it – SLOPPY.

T-Mobile:

title: Cell Phones,Cellular Phone Plans,Prepaid Cell Phones,Free Cell Phones & Deals – Stick Together with T-Mobile
meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, noodp, noydir”
meta name=”description” content=”T-Mobile: Cell phones you love, plans you want. Offering the<br /> best deals on cellular phone service, prepaid cell phones, cell phone accessories, free cell phones & more!”
meta name=”keywords” content=”T-Mobile, T Mobile, tmobile, tmoblie, tmobil t mobil, homepage, tmobile.com, tmoble, cell phones, cell phone accessories, cell phone plans, prepaid cell phones, cellular phones, prepaid cell phone, cell phone deals, free cell phones, cell phone service, free cell phone, cellular phone, cellular phone service”

T-mobile was the only one to put in a meta robots tag and mention specifically to not use the listing in the ODP or the Yahoo Directory. This of course would allow them to change their title and description as they see fit and not what is in ODP or Ydir.

This title I think is the worst. There 4 keyword phrases all include “cell phone” before the name T-Mobile – and they put their slogan before the name. It still looks pretty bad. In the meta description – they didn’t do too bad Reads ok. in the keywords they included a massive 20 keyword phrases. Including “homepage” “tmobile.com” and things like that – this is just silly. 20 meta tag keywords will have you flagged as a spammer in several search engines.

Sprint:

title Welcome to Sprint – Cell Phones, Mobile Phones, Plans for Personal and Business Wireless /title

Sprint wins the cleanest header award – since they just had a title and a few css sheet references and 6 .js calls.

As for the title – they put the brand first and the keywords second – finally you think they aren’t a bunch of seo blackhat spammers.

Mind you these are the corporate web presence for the biggest cellular phone carriers in the United States. All of which have millions of customers and billions of dollars invested in infrastructure. You would think that they would all go ahead and hire someone who knows how to market their sites and not use dirty trickery.

And Now the Results

go to google and type in cell phones. Take a gander at who ranks first?

  1. wireless.att.com
  2. t-mobile
  3. reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/
  4. google news results
  5. wirefly.com
  6. ebay
  7. letstalk.com
  8. foncentral.com
  9. howstuffworks.com page
  10. cell-phone-plans.net (an inphonic reseller)
  11. pcmag.com page
  12. amazon listing
  13. walmart.com listing
  14. Verizon Wireless – all the way down here.

Guess where Sprint is? Thats right number 37! See what happens when you put your brand first and your keywords second?

A quick search for cell phone no s at the end returned a similar results with att, tmobile and vzw all in the top 4.

A search for cell phone plans – returned

#1 – t-mobile
#6 – VZW
#8 and 9 – ATT – double listing

So what can we take away from all this? If you put your main keywords that you want to rank for first in your title – you will often have a better result in google. But at what cost? You can do this on some pages, but make sure to not kill your brand in the process.

Thats all for now folks



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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 and is filed under Cellular Phones.

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