SEO question

[Vodka7]

Hey all,

A friend of mine does hand stenciled and spray painted clothing, most of which she now sells through her Etsy.  Her problem is that her MySpace is older and is the first result when you put in her company name (the Etsy and her domain don't even show on the first page, although FB and Twitter do.)  She'd rather it were the Etsy, or her domain name.  (This is not a hotly contested search, since eight of the first ten results are all about her.  She doesn't care about generic terms either, just wants to lower MySpace and raise Etsy/thedomain.)

Is there any easy way to do this?  I really don't think she'd even care if we just completely delisted the MySpace from Google, if that's at all possible.

I realize I know nothing about SEO and am probably undervaluing the work involved.  Is there a basic book I could read, or some articles?

Thanks for any help.

[Monkeyleg]

What's the URL for each one?

[tyme]

Delete the myspace page, or do an incoming link search (google link:www.foo.bar/page) and contact those pages to get them to change their links?

[CNYCacher]

To start, every page she has under her control needs to have a link added to the homepage she wants to promote.

And this is fail:

Click here for my real website

This is win:

Click here for my real website: Nancy's Widgets, Gizmos and Afghans

Seems like you cornered the market on her niche search already.  Destroying the pages which own that search result is the WRONG way to go about this.  You need to make THOSE pages promote the page she really wants.  Then, find out WHY those pages own the search result.  most likely it is due to third parties linking to them.  So someone's blog post or links page or whatever is linking to her myspace.  Find out who and ask them to link to the real page instead.

[Vodka7]

CNYCacher: Thanks for the tips, I'll send her all that info.

Monkeyleg:

Search term is "rainbow alternative." Myspace is http://www.myspace.com/rainbowalternative . Etsy is http://www.rainbowalternative.com (which is just a forwarder to rainbowalternative.etsy.com).

[Monkeyleg]

Is "rainbow alternative" a common phrase? I'm just wondering if she's capturing enough potential customers.

It's not good that she's being outranked by articles about her. She would do well to have her own site, and link to the etsy site for final sales.