28
Jan
2008
Our SEO adventure - or climbing the google rankings
We've been progressively working on our website for a while now. Like all businesses its harder to have a website that is better than the underlying business's vision and processes. Luckily we have been making some good progress in those areas - and as a result our website is starting to show some key improvements.
However where we showed up on google searches was still a bit of an embarrassment. From what I could tell, most "normal" google searches would put us on about page 12 of the search results. Most searchers rarely go past page 1. When google did pass us visitors it was usually for explicit searches like "acorn web studio" or for searches for terms that weren't all that useful to us, like "website gurus".
Its time to get serious!
Here's my plan...
First of all I needed to review my search terms and make a guess at what terms potential clients might use to search for us. Once I had the search terms defined the next step was to look at how we presented them in the website. We want those terms applied as effectively as possible throughout the site. Finally I plan to set up a program to place as many hyperlinks as I can within the wider web that point back to our site.
Key search terms
Our services
Our first area of concern are the keywords that describe our services and customers. That is the most likely approach potential customers will take to finding us through the search engine (even though they haven't heard of us yet). I drew up this list
- web design
- web development
- email marketing campaigns
- content management systems
- web strategy
- small business
- print designers
Regional terms
Regional terms are important. Because of the internet there is no real physical limitation on who I can supply services to, but its not that realistic to hope to be on the front page for a world wide search for "website design". I need to choose my battles more carefully. I've decided on the following terms.
- Melbourne
- Collingwood
- Northcote
- Fitzroy
- Brunswick
- Carlton
Key differences
These terms are a little more prosaic, and really reflect what I'm interested in, rather than my customers, but then again you never know. And I am passionate about them, and I do think they represent a real market difference and a real product advantage. Its just that a lot of my market doesn't really know how important they are yet. I'm going to stick them in anyway and see if I get a bite.
- Standards compliance
- cascading stylesheets (CSS)
- usability
- user-friendly
- separation of presentation and content
- javascript
- agile programming
Placement of content
Google and other search engines look for keyword placement within a webpage. The more often a keyword appears in a web page the more likely it is that google will think that my page is important for the requested search. This only works up to a point though. The text "penguin, penguin, penguin, penguin, penguin, penguin, penguin" is probably not going to boost me on a penguin search, as google is wary of such blatant attempts to exploit its search algorithms.
keyword placement
Google also notices where a key word is placed. If it appears in page titles, headings, hyperlinks or URLs then google is more likely to decide it is an important word than if it is just placed in a paragraph. Another key area is placing your keywords in the alt tags of the images that you publish - I need to go back and review this.
Using our CMS it is really easy for us to place our key services and regional terms within page titles and global banners. It took about 3 minutes. Later on I can review those words and re-adjust them just as quickly. Its also very easy for us to add key words to the urls. However for much of our site we are using human friendly urls that match with printed media, so I'm leaving them alone. I think I will review some of the specialist page urls though and really pump them up. We are going to update the code so that our blog posts contain the post title, rather than just numbers.
I also placed some extra examples in the front page to make it more attractive. I placed them in a heading element, so that google found it important, but then I styled the text so that it was small and pale, so that it didn't distract the human reader from paying attention to the visual sales message I was sending to them.
Linking back to acornweb
I'm reading a lot of other people's blogs at the moment, mostly of a technical nature. This expands my knowledge of web game, but also gives me opportunities to leave comments. With each comment I leave a hyperlink that points back to www.acornweb.com.au. I always try to say something of relevance or value on the comment. Its important not to leave junk or spam. Google notices all these links pointing to our website and decides that we are more important as a result. And its free!
Publishing is a sneaky trick
Not only is google noticing all the content I'm adding to my website through this blog (and rewarding me with a higher google ranking as a result) but I've just posted a page in my site that includes all my relevant keywords, presented in a useful and valid way. Its a win-win situation. If this post becomes too popular I may even have to stick an ad in it!
Google ranking and early results.
At the moment our google ranking is 2. In my experience you need to be 4 or higher to really rank well on a google search. That's when the web becomes a constant funnel of prospects and clients. Our client, Fitstyler, has a ranking of 4 and currently gets 90% of their customers directly through the webiste. We have a way to go before we get there, and my basic strategy is to publish regularly and build up the hyperlinks pointing back to us. I'm hoping to reach 4 within 6 months.
But wait...
I added the key services and regional terms last week.
- web design
- web development
- Melbourne
- Collingwood
- Northcote
- Fitzroy
- Brunswick
- Carlton
Already we are now on the front page for all the regional terms except for Melbourne. That's still a little competitive for us and we are ranked on the 20th page on that search. However, 20 minutes work has already increased our exposure significantly. With further work things can only improve. Over time I will post several more posts on this topic as I track our progress.
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