A few minutes later my SEO guy hit reply all: “I took a closer look at the traffic sources. It appears the big traffic surge this week was due to about 1000 unsubscribes. When you remove them from the analysis traffic is down this week.”

Lucky for me, the SEO guy was fired, not me, but it truly was an SEO HORROR STORY and one, I hope not to repeat this year. Luckily our uniques and page views have doubled since last year and in the past 6 weeks alone we have TRIPLED page views with a new website design that seems to keep people on the site an extra minute and a half!

If you can’t see that, I think we can all agree this is a most outrageous fishing expedition. (Maybe a cursed] fishing expedition…)

From: “Recruiter”
Subject: urg req / seo specialist
To: ME
Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 5:24 PM

Hi ,

Requirement for your read. Pl go through it and if interested mail me your updated resume asap

The SEO specialist will:

• Before we meet, tell us what kind of Google Analytics reports are needed (e.g. keyword traffic). If we trust this person, we can give our site access to this person – so maybe he/she can generate the reports we need. So this person must know how to use Google Analytics. This may take an hour or so – on the preparation work.
• Provide the “Company X” team an overview of what SEO means to an ad agency’s site and basic best practices (having effective tags and keywords for each key page, how to get to those effective tags and keywords, having a site map on the home page, making sure there’s text to go with flash, getting inbound links, how to utilize Google Analytics to help us review our SEO efforts, and other tactics to get us viewable by search engines). I would also like the specialist to provide us a list of FREE tools (Google mainly) that he/she uses for gauging keyword traffic. Google constantly comes up with really cool tools – would like the specialist to point us to a few important ones. Plus there are always new trends in SEO. Can this person share a few latest trends with us? I would make this a 2 hour meeting (Web or in-person meeting), plus preparation time obviously.
• Provide a few agency sites that has great SEO disciplines applied – for our reference. Give us a brief summary of what SEO best practices these sites have applied. This should take the specialist another hour or so. No meetings needed – just a simple doc (no frills!) will do.
• Meet with our web site designer when we are ready with our final creative concept. Discuss up front any SEO concerns with the concept – so the designer can make adjustment. I don’t know how much time will be required from the SEO specialist – as I don’t know how easy/difficult the discussion/negotiation with the designer might be in terms of balancing between a creative concept and SEO best practices. Maybe a few hours spread throughout a couple of weeks – mainly via phone meetings I assume?
• Work with the “Company X” team (me!) on the keyword list to optimize. This list will be the “main” keywords we want to be searched – we cannot have an ultra-long list – we need to be focused. I can work with the specialist on this – and it should take a couple of hours.
• Give us the tags (title tags, description, keywords etc.) when the site is ready – for each page. This should be very easy/straight forward as we will have a relatively small site. A couple of hours – max.
• Not sure what can be done on the inbound link strategy… would like the specialist’s thoughts.
• Total time budget – I would say around 10-15 hours – spread over our site planning/design/development time.

Specific questions for the SEO specialist:
• Does this person have tools he/she can use for this project? We do not have any tools we can provide.
• We need someone who has hands-on SEO experience – who has worked in an SEO agency for at least a few years. What sites have this person worked on?
• How does this person keep himself/herself up-to-date with SEO trends/techniques?
• Does this person have any contacts at Google? (Google changes their algorithm all the time… if you have a contact there, you may be able to get some insider info.)

Thanks & Regards
“Recruiter”

SO, if I’m reading this correctly, what they’re saying is: “Come in; show us examples of what’s good, and tell us why. Tell us how you do it. Leave us some documentation to that effect (we’ll be taking notes too!), and we’ll get back to you.”
“Come on, it’ll only take you a few hours preparation! And a few more hours presentation…”

I honestly can’t believe this job request. I wonder if they’ll get any one to bite?

Moral to the story: Do your research well or your research might just do you! LOL

Blessings,
Wendy Merritt

References: The video shows the winning entries http://www.domainvestors.tv/domainvestors-tv-weekly-video-the-importance-of-fresh-content/

My domain name is Nazbo.com

So I get this email from a local company that is angry because my client is now on the first page in the search results. His gripe is that we can’t advertise for a location we are not directly in…No, I am not joking. We optimized for a location in Sarasota/Siesta Key, but the business is based in Nokomis, Florida just south of Sarasota and I really mean just south.

Complaint #1

“You aren’t located on Siesta Key so you can’t advertise for it”. He tells me it is illegal. If this was so no one in America could advertise in anyway, shape or form. I tried to explain, but he just didn’t understand, or so I thought…I will explain later.

Complaint #2

To avoid anymore harassment from this fellow I am going to create a fictitious, but similar example of what happened. Let’s say that there is an LLC called, “Key Biscayne Ferrari” and let’s say for my client’s site we optimized for “Key Biscayne Ferrari Rentals”. The complainer’s complaint was that his business name was in the title tag because we had “Key Biscayne Ferrari”. in the tag, but we had rentals after it, an entirely different phrase…He said this was illegal. In fact, he insisted it was with 25 phone calls, emails and threats.

I tried to explain that this was in fact not illegal. I encouraged him to go see his attorney. In fact, I begged him to. He threatened my client, then threatened me and threatened anyone he could. End result…he had no leg to stand on and went away. My client is still on the first page of the search engines right next to his business. Maybe he learned, maybe he didn’t, but he was a massive pain in the butt for awhile.

Background

In July, I was brought on at DSNews.com to help them do a redesign of the site. DSNews.com is a site dedicated to the news related to the Default Service Industry. The term default service is also called REO (real estate owned). It refers to properties that have gone into default on their mortgages and are now being services by the banks (real estate owned). The banks or loan services are responsible to cut the grass, change the locks, etc. The site has a number of contributors and published around 12-15 stories a day and has a daily webcast video with daily news highlights.

The words re-write always make me fearful. The reason for this is that many times it just involves a facelift. Real issues such as copy, calls to action, and the underlying code are often overlooked. Objectivity on a site is often lost, when you spend so much time working on it. For these reasons it is important to not jump into a re-write prematurely. Also, it is important to look at the re-write or redesign of a site as the starting line and not the finish line.

After my initial review of DSNews.com, I knew it was in need of a re-write. The page layout and navigation were confusing, but the content was top notch. The design made the content and articles looked like an after thought. Buttons of companion websites drowned out the site’s articles. The main feature on the page was a daily video and breaking news. The news was display in a very small frame that required a lot of scrolling. In a nutshell the content was great, but the design was awful.

The site’s navigation was just as self-serving as the large buttons that dominated the page. They were items like, about us, about me, more about me, and even more about me. There was only one tab out of seven that had anything to do with the news.

I interviewed the editors and got their feedback. They were not very happy with the admin/CMS interface. It was slow, confusing and limited. Talking through their daily workflow and highlighted a couple major areas that could be easily automated to save them 2-3 hours a day.

SEO Problems

So the site had a number of fatal SEO flaws:
• The same title for every page
• Poorly designed URLs, they all went through /index.php/.
• Params were just database keys passed with ids so it would be cat=4 instead of cat=foreclosure.
• No meta-descriptions.
• Relative URLs. This blew me away; when a new story was posted it would change the URLs of past stories relative to the new URL. I couldn’t ever get my head around how it exactly worked and neither could Google.
• Slow, on a shared host.
• The only keyword it showed up for was its domain name.

Half of the traffic the site was receiving was coming directly from the daily email they sent with the day’s top news or referring sites. A quarter of the traffic was from bookmarks or direct type in of the domain. The last quarter was from the search engines, but if you looked at the keywords you would see that DS News or DSNews.com account for 95% of the search volume.

SEO Solutions

When I went to redesign the site I followed the 4 steps I use for setting up a website (clear URLs, up to date sitemap, quality title and meta tags, quality content). Fortunately the site already had great content.

Clear URLs

Before designing anything or writing any code I planned out the major sections of the site:
/ (home)
/articles/
/articles/archive/
/cat/ (content matching this cat)
/pro/ (types of readers)
/videos/
/search
/newsletter
/events

All of these URLs make it easy to see at a glance what the traffic on the site is doing. The old URLs and identical titles made it nearly impossible to surmise what people were doing once they were on the site.

Up to Date Sitemap

Since this is a news site it was important to think about the freshness of our content when designing our sitemap. Since we had 3 years of new archive, which amounted to about 4000 stories, it was not practical to include all these stories in the sitemap. I split the sitemap into two sections news content and non-news content. The newsmap has the last 100 articles in the Google newsmap format. The sitemap has all the non-news content. The population of these sitemaps automated by the CMS.

Quality Title and Meta Tags

I automated the generation of the page title, meta tags and SEO friendly URLs. The editors simply paste the title and body of the story into the CMS and it takes over the rest. It ensures that all the Titles are meaningful and the meta-tags are accurate. They are also able to quickly tag the article with relevant tags, categories and reader types.

Putting it all together

I worked with the companies designer and editorial team to get an agreed upon design. We went with a newspaper feel for the site. We organized all the content by category and reader type. We minimized the non-news part of the site in the navigation such as contact us, about us, etc. We also created a sitemap like footer with lots of helpful information.

The homepage is a busy page, but what news page is not. I made it easy for the editors to change out all the different stories, headlines, and article images. We put a lot of focus on the large image on the homepage. We decide to make it rotate the day’s top stories and decided to also buy quality images on a daily basis to make it really pop. The slider is a highly clicked on area.

I didn’t bother to open the old code to figure out what I could save and what I couldn’t. I just let it go, started over from scratch. Having the URLs already defined it made it easy to know what to do next. I just went down the list of URLs until all the pages were coded.

The Results

The rewrite started on July 1. On August 1 we did a “soft” launch and moved the site to a new dedicated server so the site was also faster than ever. I hit my goal of rewriting the site and not adding a single feature. We were short a couple of features like a search and video archive, but those were not showstoppers. The old site’s version of these features never really worked. These features were added in the weeks to follow.

Google loved our new site and new sitemaps. We started to show up for terms other than DS News. At the end of August, Google news picked us up and the site really took off. This chart shows the growth over the previous month.

Historical Growth
Month Unique Visitors Visits Page Views Email Signups
Sep-09 91% 76% 53% 84%
Aug-09 83% 54% 84% 154%

Conclusion

We have experience a 350% grows in visitors and a 281% increase in page views in the two months since the site was re-launched. The content, which is high quality, is pretty much the same, with the addition of one new writer. The only thing the site was missing was some SEO and good design.

My story begins in 2006 … my not-for-profit company began the difficult task of migrating a web site of approximately 20,000 pages in depth, from one content management system to a new content management system. To facilitate this daunting task, a third party tool was used during the operation to migrate the content. The migration tool caused hidden, duplicate meta tags (keywords, in particular) to be added to the source code of every page in our web site.

Since search optimization was one of my primary responsibilities, I knew these tags on our site posed potential danger. I expressed my concerns to management and even noted drops in rank for much of our content over the months. However, because the third party tool’s maker specifically assured us that placing the duplicate meta tags in the code would have no negative consequences on our site, especially since they were hidden. The hidden meta tags remained on the site so the migration could be completed.

On a cold, dreary January day in 2007, after several months with the hidden meta tags on our site, I, the webmaster, received an ominous email from Google, notifying me several of our site’s pages were removed from Google’s index because our practices had violated Google’s guidelines.

My blood ran cold. We could not lose the top referrer of traffic to our site. That could mean someone losing his/her head!

After we wrote a sincere, apologetic letter to Google requesting reinclusion, outlining the transgressions and promising to never allow them to occur again in the future, we seemed to escape the specter of a major penalty.

Whatever the reason, we were very fortunate to come from this experience uninjured, with wiser minds and more careful practices. We survived to tell our story to others.

Beware … even though Google and many other search engines may not use the keywords meta tag, if you handle it improperly, you could be doomed to suffer dire consequences!