Project log 3: WhiteBoxUK

Today's topic of choice is the work I've been doing for WhiteBoxUK, a hotel procurement and consultancy service. As part of the SEO package offered by the company I work for, I find relevant web directories and submit the customer's site. This, like everything else, has its own issues to work out. Finding a relevant and accurate category for a company with a wide range of services can be quite a challenge, especially as a lot of directories don't like you submitting sites in quite vague categories, nor is that particularly targeted to readers. For WhiteBoxUK, I had to emphasise the consultancy side of the business for a lot of directories, and the procurement and support side for others. It's nice to keep the category chosen consistent between all directories, but I feel it's much better for directory users to tailor your choice to the exact categories offered on each site. After all, it's these users that you're trying to entice to click on the link. There is PageRank potential in having a lot of links, but don't forget that PageRank isn't what you're trying to enhance. The goal of good SEO is to increase the sales / revenue generated by the website, generally done by increasing the amount of traffic to the page through high PageRank, but also making sure that these extra users are interested and likely to appreciate the site's offered services. High PageRank through spam means nothing if all of your visitors take one look and leave. This ties into optimising the site itself, which I'll probably cover in a later post.

Today's summary: don't forget that it's not just the number of links and clicks that matters, it's the quality of them, and making sure that the customer will find your site useful. After all, conversions are your goal not just views.

Project log 2: Shoppers' Lounge

Today I've been working on SEO for Shoppers' Lounge, an online classified ads site. As always, an obstacle presented itself: how do you gauge the performance of a site you have no analytics data for? Fortunately in this case the site owner had previously set up a Google Analytics account, so after some phonecalls I got access to all of the past data. This isn't always the case however. In previous projects, I've come up against issues such as a predecessor registering important company accounts to their personal email addresses, and taking all of the login details with them when they left. Unfortunately, in cases like that you're pretty much stuffed. Google's support is less than stellar, after a week or two of waiting I eventually got a response telling me to ask said predecessor for the login details, despite mentioning in the support ticket that they were long gone and uncontactable.

As a result, I set up an SEO department policy to group all logins for everything SEO-related into one company login. I also implemented a small database accessible by all SEO staff that lists all relevant details for current customers, including Google Analytics tracking IDs. Today's lesson is that logins like these aren't as irrelevant as losing your Facebook password, instead you're denying your company access to a lot of valuable data. Keep track of details, use consistent email addresses and so on, and most importantly share the knowledge among the whole department. If somebody leaves, there shouldn't be any loss of data. If you're a one man SEO department, you can still make efforts to preserve information, keep notes of whatever you do to aid whoever may join or replace you. When I started in this business I was grateful for whatever knowledge people could hand down to me, and I'm sure you were too.

Project log 1: InternetForFree

One of my current SEO projects is a new ISP called InternetForFree. Unlike most of the stuff I do, this is a new site from scratch, so rather than trying to shoehorn some keywords into existing pages I had the chance to write a lot of the site copy myself. It also has a fairly generic but very search-friendly name, which would make my job easier if those particular keywords weren't an incredibly high source of competition. Another drawback to this new site is the fact that it took about a week after the site first went up for any of the major search engines to notice it, even after submitting sitemaps. However, it was rather satisfying to see the site immediately grab second spot on Google UK for 'internetforfree' once their spiders caught on. That's not my goal though. When it comes to 'internet for free' as a keyword, the valuable one, the site is nowhere. Funnily enough, a site I chose as a competitor for comparison, which happens to use very similar keywords and content, ranks around #11 for that phrase, despite using it less. It seems that being an older site really is a boon to your rankings, and the thousand or so inbound links it had from generic directories, although low-value, certainly didn't hurt it. Looks like I still have a way to go with the InternetForFree site, so I'm sure there will be plenty more posts on this topic to come. Hopefully I can keep a little progress report running on it and other projects.

First post

As a SEO bloke, I get to do loads of stuff for lots of different clients. Most of this is finding competition, identifying keywords and other stuff.

The more interesting side of it is writing content, and this is where this blog comes in. Every once in a while I might post my random musings on the state of SEO and the joys of search engine marketing. But the real purpose of this blog, and what I hope might make it sort of interesting, is to post the content I do for our clients.

Now, I'm doing work for clients like digital photo labs, dance shoes, internet service providers, hotel procurement and marketing consultants - so hopefully there should be something of interest somewhere.

If you have any questions on SEO drop a comment on the site and I'll see what I can do ....