Raef Lee from WineInvestor.com was looking to increase traffic and build links to his site. With a partner and some online research, we at Team and a Dream completed an online marketing package with him and learned a lot about search engine optimization in the process. In fact, here are the results we obtained in the early stages:
165.06% - Increase in Alexa Rank. This measures the traffic of the site over a three month period. For more information, visit www.alexa.com.
15.38% - Increase in Incoming Links. (This is found by typing “link:www.yoursite.com” in your Google or Yahoo search box). This number is actually higher but all the links were not visible yet.
20.00% - Increase in Monthly Traffic to Site. (This was determined using Google Analytics).
652.00% - Increase in traffic from search engines. (Also determined using Google Analytics).
104.00% - Increase in Google Indexed Pages. (Found by using a tool offered by many SEO sites - one site to try is www.selfseo.com).
1267.00% - Increase in Yahoo Indexed Pages. (Note: Use the same tool before and after to ensure accuracy).
500.00% - Increase in MSN Indexed Pages.
Some of these numbers reflect dramatic growth. How did we accomplish this? We started off by documenting the current status of the site to quantify the results after the changes have been made. This included aspects like PageRank, pages indexed, Alexa ranking, number and PageRank of incoming links, and monthly traffic. Most of this was done with a Google search – a great resource when used properly. (Note: If your PageRank comes up as zero, try typing in “yoursite.com” instead of “www.yoursite.com”).
Next we analyzed, modified and added several page factors of the site such as the title tag, meta tags, alt tags and sitemaps.
The title tag of the homepage is a HTML code that shows the words that appear in the title bar of your web browser. It’s important to ensure it communicates the theme of your web page because search engine crawlers use those words during the ranking process to analyze the relevance of your web pages.
The title tag of the homepage used to be “Wine Investor Community”. After a keyword research, it was changed to “Wine Investing, Wine Finder, Advice Investment Wine – The Wine Investor Community”. Performing keyword research enabled us to determine the competitiveness of our keywords. Our goal was to target highly searched terms that have as little competition as possible. In the end, relevancy was most important element and we enabled our client to choose the best keywords/phrases from a list we compiled since he knows which words would suit his website best. A great site to use to search for keywords is http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.
(Update: Try this link for a list of the top 10 keyword search tools - http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/06/winner-best-keyword-research-tool/).
The meta tags were then modified. The two most common types of meta tags are the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag. The meta description tag is the part of HTML code that allows you to give a short summary of your web page content. These are the words that are shown in search engine result pages just below the title tag as a brief description of your web page.
Meta keyword tags are a list of keywords that are relevant to the content of your website that you'd like search engines to rank your site upon. To increase the ranking of WineInvestor.com, a keyword rich description and keyword tags were added.
A Google sitemap was then created and submitted to Google. This directs web crawlers to find pages on your site more accurately and also informs Google’s crawlers of new additions or recent changes on your site. For more information, visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/. Other files created include a Robots.txt file, Info.txt file and a ROR Sitemap. These files help optimize how search engine spiders scan your site.
We found there were no alt tags present in the images. An alt tag is a description of an image in case the link to that image is broken or the visitor is using a text only browser. We added keywords to the alt tags relevant to the theme of the images.
Finally, we submitted the site to over 200 major directories. Doing a Google search for “search engine directories” will bring back links to many sites where you can submit your site for free or for a small fee. (Note: Submissions can take up to six months to appear on a directory).
In conclusion, our client was extremely satisfied with the results.
Tips? Comments? Please free to share them with us!
Written by: Yasmine Mustafa
Hi Skip,
The best metric that I see you using, and the most impressive is the 652% increase in search engine traffic.
The meta keyword tag really doesn't hold much value these days, and hasn't for years. From an indexing perspective, the same is true with meta descriptions - though a good meta description that includes the keyword phrase someone is searching for may appear as the snippet shown for the page in search results, and may persuade someone to visit.
The pagerank that shows in the Google toolbar is only updated 3 or 4 times a year, and isn't an accurate reflection of the pagerank of your page. But keep in mind that pagerank is also just one of a very large number of signals that Google is looking at when ranking pages.
The Alexa rank, since it's derived from a self selected group, and only captures a relatively small level of traffic, isn't really an ideal tool to use to measure value of SEO services either. I'd recommend steering away from any SEO firm that does tell you that it is worth measuring and tracking.
Not quite sure what you mean by the number of Yahoo pages indexed where found through Google. Yahoo's site explorer tool should provide you with some helpful numbers there.
Cheers.
Bill
Posted by: Bill | July 31, 2007 at 10:28 AM
Sadly, Overture's search term frequency tool was abandoned last January. Try it and you will see that you won't get any results later than that month.
Posted by: Bob | July 30, 2007 at 10:39 AM
Sadly, Overture's search term frequency tool was abandoned last January. Try it and you will see that you won't get any results later than that month.
Posted by: Bob | July 30, 2007 at 10:38 AM