Bottiger.org wrote

A Real life SEO case study

2011-09-15T13:34:40Z

In my spare time I do some web consulting for various customers. One of them is Compass NLC which is a company who offers a wide range of courses in Lean manufacturing. When I started working for them I was just helping them getting online with a webpage, but and after I was done they of course also wanted to be number one on Google when people searched for "lean kursus" (eng: lean courses) and "lean uddannelse" (eng: lean education). It did not take much work to get them number one at the time, but the competition grew and after a year they went from number one down to number 2 or 3 for these certain search terms.

This is a post explaining what I have done and what I will do in order to help them get back as number one. I write it because there is a lot of (mis)information about SEO out there on the web and only very little information where people actually disclose numbers and real effects of their efforts.

Justification of being number one

Okay, before moving into the actual SEO I just want to point out why I think it should be possible to get him be number one.

The competition for lean courses in Denmark is among a handful of players, all around the same size. There is no giant in the field who clearly should rank above all the others.
The other players may have decent websites, but it is clear that the are not skilled in SEO. I am not claiming to be an expert by any means, but from the look of the technical setup of their homepages it is clear that they are not very technical.
I honestly do believe he deserves it. While I know nothing of lean at all I can see he gets way better ratings and testimonials by his clients than anyone else.

The Status right now (15-SEP-2011)

I am writing this post a while after I started working and therefore I have already made some changes, but heres a quick update. I will also post some screenshots from "google webmaster tools", but unfortunately the webmaster tools only have a history of around one month - which is not enough to document the changes in his ranking over the last 3 to 6 months.

New Domain

When I started working one the site his domains was his company name. While a logical and simple choice I thought it might be a good idea to buy a new domain with his keywords in the name. Furnunatly a lot of them were available, and we immediately bought leankursus.dk. However, while we did buy a bunch of other related domains we made the obvious mistake of not buying every other domain related to leankursus.dk and soon after one of his competitors bought all kinds of similar domains - including lean-kursus.dk - which have turned out to be a mess because of the similarities. But it is too late to do something about that now.

Also, while we were the only one with a domain containing the keywords we saw a huge improvement in our rankings.

Speed

I use concrete5 as our CMS because it is without comparison the most user friendly CMS I have seen. On the flipside it tends to be quite slow, and have only recently added caching. Furthermore the website was hosted at dreamhost which offers a decent service, but tend to have very slow servers.

Therefore one of the first things I did was move his website to my own server, since Google has announced they value the page speed as a metric for site ranking.

As you can see the current speed of leankursus.dk is around one second but my own site has an average speed way below that and I believe that should be possible here too. However, right now it is not critical in any way anymore.

Keywords

The keywords google associates with his sites are pretty decent. Although "Uddannelse" (eng: education) ranks a little too low.

Source Cleanup

While I am not sure this actually have any effect on the actual search rankings I cleaned up the HTML source code of his page, removing legacy javascript libraries, and css-files. Something which I have had on my todo-list for a while but never gotten around to do.

All the usual things

We all know that tags are not what they used to be. Alright, the description-tag actually do something, and is a valuable tool in promoting your site on google, but the keywords are useless. Non the less I added a few very relevant keywords hoping some value some where in the system.

I also went through all his pages and made sure they had a proper < title >-tag and a decent URL.

More text on the front page

During his last redesign of the site he wanted a lighter and more visual front page. When a user entered the front page he wanted four big boxes which linked to his four most popular courses. While it indeed looked good it turned out to be a less good move in terms of SEO because the lack of text got his page to descend a bit in Googles rankings. After realizing this I told him that we needed more relevant text with keywords on the front page in order for google to know what his page was all about.

We ended up writing about the services the company offers below the four boxes. While this is certainly not optimal it’s a compromise we are trying out for now. If it fails we have to rethink the design and move the text further up.

His PageRank

One of the things which puzzled me quite a bit was that although google claims their page rank only is one out of many many signals they use - it is commonly seen as a important metric to optimize. And while leankursus.dk only ranked as number 3 on google his page rank was much higher than his competitors. Non of them had a page rank above 1 while he actually had a page rank of 3. Remembering that page rank is a logarithmic scale this difference should be huge.

Search rankings

Most importantly his search rankings. This is a screenshot from google webmaster tools. As you can see he ranks reasonable well on the two main search terms “lean kursus” and “lean uddannelse”. I should be noted however that even though the webmaster tools says he on average ranks around position 5 my experience says that he ranks around 2 or 3 on every computer in my city. I can only conclude that the lower rankings comes from searches in another geographical location which is not too interesting due to the local nature of his business.

I will update it in a month to see how it looks

Future Work

I will update this post in the near future when I have had the time to implement more changes to the website and given it some time to propagate into Googles rankings. This is a list of thing I have on my todo-list

Optimize HTML: Remove cruft, and make sure the relevant content comes as far up as possible in the source code
More Inbound links: We all know that good inbound links are hard to get. Especially when you are not doing something which attract bloggers, but I do think I have some good contacts Rich Snippest
+1 Button: We already had a +1 button on the page in the past, but removed it since he did not like it and you had to be logged in in order to press it - which non of his customers were. But now that Google is putting +1's into its search results we might bring it back
Farm Pages: Even though I warned him about making a lot of cheap pages and use them as a link farm all of his competitors are doing it, and on this small scale it seems to work quite well.

Canonical URLs, Permalinks and how I chose to structure my URLs

2011-08-23T18:39:44Z

The web has come a long way since we had URLs like blog.asp?post=101 ten years ago and until today were the average blog most likely will have some kind of search engine friendly URL which includes the title of the current page.

One problem with this approach is that URLs should not change while everyone are free to update their content. So, if you have a URL with a typo http://yoursite.com/posts/how-I-ebcame-rich and want to fix it when you find it a month after the post has been made public, what do you do? Or, what do you do when you just need to update a post title from "Hello World in 7 different languages" to "Hello World in 101 different languages" ?

This has traditionally not been taken seriously since there has been no reason to do so. A few years ago you could just change the URL, and if you where nice - have the old page redirect with a 301 status code to the new one.

However, while the internet is becoming more and more integrated with social services and rating systems like Googles +1 button its becoming increasingly important to keep track of which URL content belongs to.

Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs was originally created by Google in order to tell Google what your preferred URL for a specific page was, in order for Google to display it correctly in its search results. A classical example is, which of these URLs should google link to in its search results?

mysite.com/index.html
www.mysite.com
www.mysite.com/index.html

They will all work, they will probably all display the same thing, other sites may link to any of them, but there is no way to be sure it actually is the same page. A canonical URL can tell the search engine that the content on these pages are indeed the same and which page the webmaster prefers people use.

You define a canonical URL for your pages by inserting the following META-tag in the section of you page

<link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.com/index.html"/>

While the previous example have mostly been the search engines pain the use of canonical URLs have found an additional use by the introduction of the +1 button - and this time its interesting for webmasters too. If a page has multiple URLs you can by specifying a common canonical URL tell Google that it is indeed the same page. This way you can keep your +1's even if a visitor visits the page from another URL.

But what about the changing URLs? There are two basic properties you want your system to have

You want to be able to change our posts without having any legacy URLs
You do not want to lose you +1's or other metrics bound to that URL.

Canonical URls vs. Permalinks

Permalinks provide a URL to a page which the webmaster guarantees his visitors will not change in the future. This is not the same a telling a search engine that the content on a page is the same as on another page, but they do share the same properties because they are both a unique URL for a specific page.

So while permalinks were introduced for a completely different reason than canonical URLs they do provide an excellent canonical URL for your pages.

How I designed by URLs

As you can see I chose to design my URLs with a post id followed by the post title for search engines and general convenience. While some people chose to completely omit the post id I do not like this solution since the benefits next to none and it requires a lot of extra code and extending your database in order to work around duplicate titles.

The advantage of sticking the post id in front of the post title is also that you can get the id by just calling your programming languages built in to integer method on the last part of the URL in order to get the id.

Furthermore it becomes easy to create a canonical URL from this scheme. By omitting the title you have a canonical URL which will stay the same no matter how much you change the title in the future, and without adding any extra infrastructure to your code.

There is however an extra thing you need to remember. if you set /blog/id as you canonical URL google will also use this in its search results since this was the original purpose of canonical URLs. Fortunately Google supports all the standard headers, so the best way to solve this is to have /blog/id redirect to /blog/id-title. This will always keep your URLs current, it will give you a permanent URL which never changes, and without adding any new infrastructure to your site.

And while we are on the topic of my URLs

Why did I choose to use - and not _ as a separator? The two are actually not completely interchangeable, because it turns out that Google (and perhaps other search engines) view them differently.Currently "hello_world" is interpreted as "helloworld" by Google while "hello-world" is read as "hello world". You do not believe me? Take a look for yourself.

Canonical URLs - the long version

For those of you how wants to know the whole backstore about canonical URLs should watch this video from Google

GR10 Packing list

2011-08-15T15:11:09Z

This is what I brought for my 10 days trip to the trek in the Pyrenees. If you want you can find an alternative list on pyreneeshike.com

* Hiking boots
* Trousers (preferable not cotton)
* 2-3 Synthetic t-shirts
* underwear
* warm fleece
* Hiking Socks
* Shorts

* Water bottle (1 liter is lower limit)
* Maps/guidebooks
* compass
* Map-holder/protector
* Camera
* spare batteries
* First aid kit
* sun cream
* wallet/money
* phone
* sleeping bag
* sleeping bag silk sheet
* sleeping mat
* compact towel
* Swiss army knife
* soap
* shampoo
* toilet paper
* hat
* head torch
* sunglasses
* toothpaste
* toothbrush
* earplugs
* sportstape
* water purifying tablets
* pen
* paper
* plastic bags

Trekking in the Pyrenees - Day 10, From Gavarnie to Luz and day 11

2011-08-23T18:11:00Z

This continues from day 9

This would be the last day on our trip. I had personally already mentally said goodbye to the mountains, and our main goal was go get from the small village Gavarni to the larger town Luz which was around 20 km north. We started walking the GR10 the first half but it was cloudy so we didn’t have much of a view. Later when GR10 merged with a larger road for a short while we switched to just walking on the road the last 10 kilometers. I was expecting this last part to be a bit boring but it actually turned out to also be really beautiful because we were walking in a very narrow valley, with a small river on our left side.

If you, like us, just want to get to Luz as quickly as possible this can definitely be recommended since it was a lot faster than walking the whole GR10 from Gavarnie to Luz. We were also offered a ride by a local, but kindly declined since it felt like cheating a bit too much.

In Luz they had a camping site which was priced much more like a normal camping site and not like the ultra cheap one in Arrens. We raised our tent, relaxed for a while and went into the town which was only a 5 minute walk. Here there were several possibilities for getting some good food and we found a good restaurant.

Day 11

After we packed our things we headed into Luz in order to get back to Toulouse. At the tourist information we bought two bus and train tickets for 30€ each. We were lucky to come 10 minutes before the bus left. This meant we could come to Toulouse in 5-6 hours and otherwise we would have to wait another 3 hours for the next bus.

Trekking in the Pyrenees - Day 9, From Bayssellance to Gavarnie

2011-08-23T17:58:52Z

This continues from day 8

Although Vignemale can be reached in a less than a day from Bayssellance you have to walk over a glacier, and need special equipment in order to do so. So after enjoying the view of it we began walking down the mountain again.

We saw some interesting small man made caves in the mountain walls and had to walk over some small glaciers (or just big blocks of ice depending on you definition). We were aware that this was the last mountain we would see and it was a bit sad to say goodbye.

I remember it as a quite long walk, and I remember we were quite tired at this point. It was – as always – a nice hike but it was otherwise perhaps a bit uneventful.

The refugee we stayed at also had an excellent camping area, and also some English speaking visitors. Unfortunately we were both quite tired and not in the mood to talk too at lot of new people.

Continues to day 10 and day 11