Search Engine Optimisation
(referred to as SEO from here on) is the process of applying different and
varying methods in order to obtain a higher ranking on different Search Engines
for your chosen keywords. There are a myriad of different things that
contribute to the actual rank and the search engines release new algorithms
periodically so staying on top of the latest SEO news is of paramount
importance in order to maintain your website’s position.
SEO techniques vary from the very
simple to the obscenely difficult and each technique can be considered either
‘white hat’ or ‘black hat’ depending on whether it is a trustworthy and
reputable technique. For example backlink farming is considered a black hat
technique and will eventually hinder the progress of your website.
For this particular case study we
decided to analyse our own website (
http://www.asit-group.com)
and try to gain first page on Google for a search term for which we were not
indexed at all at the time. The search term chosen was “web development coffs
harbour”.
Please note that this report will
hint at the use of various tools however will not actually use any specific
names or give any specific websites used, also note that when the term ‘Google’
is used it refers specifically to ‘www.google.com’ and not any redirects based
on country.
The starting date of this research
was the 25th of October 2014 and it finished exactly two months
later on the 25th of December 2014.
After researching what the latest
algorithms demanded of high ranking websites an audit was done of our website. We
decided on how we were going to target the website in order to utilise the
chosen keywords most effectively.
The Code
Firstly, the code itself was not
compliant with the standards from the W3C and as such would have a negative
impact on the ranking. After the code was made to be compliant additional meta
tags were added, with better, more precise descriptions, titles and keywords. A
viewport was also added in order to help mobile viewing of the website.
Website Optimisation
After auditing our website we
discovered that a lot of the content on our website was not well optimised and
as such we had to go back and remake images and reword text in order to achieve
a better website responsiveness and loading time.
Moz Rank
Moz Ranking is a very important
system that does weigh in when ranking your website. Moz has the ability to
rank your website based specifically on the domain and the trustworthiness as
well as give it an overall score. After doing a fair bit of research on the
matter it was found that a decent Moz Rank starts at 3 out of a possible 10 so
this is what we were aiming for.
The Moz Rank was one benchmark used
continuously throughout the study in order to compare how the techniques were
working.
Backlinks
In order to increase the Moz Rank
as well as how the Search Engines viewed our website it was extremely important
to generate lots of reputable backlinks from trustworthy websites. Various techniques
were used for this and within the two months we went from having no backlinks
at all to at least 100, the final numbers are uncertain because there are many
different tools used to count the number of backlinks and they all had
different results.
Social Media
Some of the most trustworthy
websites according to the Search Engines are the big social media platforms
such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and of course Google itself. As
such we doubled our social media efforts and made sure we linked back to our
website at every available opportunity.
Blogging
In order for a website to appear as
trustworthy it must be seen as an ‘authority’ in the field. One of the easiest
and also most effective ways of doing this is by blogging about your selected
topic. We continued blogging about various topics as often as possible and
actually embedded our blog into our website as well and encouraged people to
visit the website to read the blog rather than the blogging platform we were
using.
Alexa Rank
Alexa is another important rank and
is basically a global rank. One of the tricky bits about SEO is this, in order
to reach a higher place and gain more traffic you first have to have a lot of
traffic. It’s a catch 22 situation. As such we tried to drive more and more
traffic to the website in order to increase this aspect and gain a better
result. What we managed to do was actually quite impressive.
Google PageRank
Google PageRank isn’t actually
updated as frequently as it should be and as such isn’t a reliable tool for
SEO, for the primary part of this research it was ignored.
Obviously there are a lot more
techniques involved in this process with a lot of different tools being tried
and tested and we actually also built a couple in house to help with the
process.
The Results
Moz Rank
The Moz Rank results jumped very
quickly in the first few days after the optimisation was applied and remained
steady for the duration of the research. Each measure was converted to a
percentage for the graph to provide a stable comparison.
Alexa Rank
This is the area where we saw the
most immediate improvement. The first graph displays the actual position (the
lower the number, the better).
Our initial rank was above 15
million and our final rank after the 2 months was about 966 000.
This next graph shows the varying
rates at which we gained places on the Alexa Rank and shows how the rate
lessened towards the higher ranks as there was a lot more competition.
It also shows how, at one point we
actually lost places on the Alexa rank.
Page Appearance
Finally the most important result,
where our website actually appeared in Google when searching for the term
chosen. Initially, the website was not anywhere in the first 30 pages (possibly
more, it wasn’t checked). Within a day we had jumped to page 8. The ranking
remained about the same for a period of time until it jumped and then jumped
again.
The end result is obvious that we
did in fact manage to get on to the first page of Google for the search term
chosen. We are currently swapping between positions 6, 7 and 8.
So if you are tired of being anonymous to your potential
customers, why not try some SEO? Contact us for a personalized quote.
Additionally for our blog post readers, if you mention this post whilst in
discussion with us, your second month will be free!
