Before I begin, I would like to emphasize I had never before done SEO. I had no clue about the terminology used, and I was never part of the club most of you have been in for a while. I have a tendency to ramble, but I assure you it is all relevant to my tale of mystery, drama, and eventually, wonder. So please bear with me. I am not trying to bring new information to the table, rather I am trying to teach others through my learning curve.
I am, and always have been, a developer, and I could not be more proud of that fact. My theme song is the classic remix of Steve Ballmer. Got a problem? I cant wait to figure out a solution. Little did I know I was about to realize a new realm of usefulness for my skills, and it was not going to be easy.
A few months ago, I started my current job at RefurbUPS as the in house website manager. It was my job to clean up their huge database of products and clients, and generally update the website. What started out as a simple prospect, has turned into an incredible learning experience for me. Little did I know how much work the site needed (and still needs!)
This company has been in business for over 10 years, relying almost entirely on SERPs and Google Adwords for traffic. I was horrified to find out that there was never any analytical software installed period! No one had any idea if anything was working. Google was just getting cut a check every month for a mountain of money, and we did not even know if it was converting! So I rolled up my sleeves, put the database overhaul on the back burner, and immediately went to work implementing Google Analytics and Adwords conversion tracking. A great start I thought, now it was time to actually look at the site.
Being a self taught developer, I have never been a marketing person. I am used to building a website from the backend up, and ease of use for the users has always been the number one priority. So walking into this job, and knowing how successful they have been before I started, I thought they had to be doing something right, after all, they were getting decent traffic and generating conversions. Now I had a way to analyze where and how visitors were coming from and converting — an amazingly important step. Imagine my shock when EVERY PAGE was nothing but keyword spam. When I say spam, I mean titles with no relevance to the page and absolutely no description. Pages loaded with keywords stuffed into font tags with the same color as the background. I soon learned that this was called “Black Hat SEO”. So I started investigating.
Immediately it became clear, no internal pages at all for the most part would rank anywhere near the first three pages, if at all. My course of action was forced to change from simply updating the site, to an almost near revamp from the ground up. After all, only having the homepage show up for specific generic terms is no where near ideal.
So I was forced to change gears, and focus my attention on the SERPs. A whole new ballgame for me. Where should I begin? I was a greenhorn, in fact, I definitely still am. So I did the only thing I knew how to do: revamp the site for the users, make them feel at home and make the store friendly without a labyrinth of marketing to wade through.
I soon made myself a checklist of obvious issues and concerns I had. It looked similar to this:
- Remove as much code bloat as possible
- Revamp all the titles
- Remove all meta tags, and build good, relevant description tags
- Search and destroy: hidden keywords
- Remove as much bloat as possible
- Clearly define call to actions and make the cart page user friendly
- Make our knowledge base crawlable
- Use one common link for all pages
- Try to work on the alt tags for images
Simple right? Definitely no where near an end goal, but a start was what I needed. Now I had to wade through the thousands of products and duplicate content. Immediately I found out about the new canonical tag, almost immediately solving one problem! With the way our CMS system works, it LOVES having 20 different URLs for the same page. So this was a breath of fresh air. Also, our system was already using descriptive urls, not dynamic. Half way there I thought! And so I began.
A few weeks later, I had greatly optimised many of the pages, and got rid of most of the spam I could. And then my heart sank. We dropped a page in Google for our “major” keywords. I started feeling like all my work had been for naught, but one thing most developers (at least myself) learn early on, is being stubborn is an advantage. So I dug deeper, and soon saw a brilliant ray of light at the end of the dark, dark tunnel I had been crawling through: We had results for product pages showing up! Landing pages would now show up. In fact, we even had a rank one for a certain keyword; I was now motivated to continue.
Now was where I started investigating this behemoth known as keyword analysis. This arcane artform is constantly pushed by many if not all SEO professionals, so I took this tool and stuck it into my belt. I built new analytics reports strictly for Adword keywords and gathering actual searched keywords, and I saw something quite incredible: those supposedly “important” keywords which we now rank lower on, were only less than 20% of the now current traffic. We saw orders picking up, more people calling in, and generally a less confused customer base trying to find the right battery for their keyword. I can only attribute this to us now resulting for interior pages.
I recieved a pat on the back, and told to keep at it.
So now here is where I stand; I still have only made a dent in the slew of changes I need to make, but the initial results are promising. My time was not wasted; in fact it has been shown to help, although the drop in the “important” keywords is heart breaking for my coworkers, for me its not that important. I now have been slowing down on the updates, and I am trying to see which changes I am doing now that help. Adding an H1 tag, bolding this term and unbolding that, and writing more user friendly copy on the category pages. But where do I go from here? Or rather, where does it end? The quest continues, and now I have the SEOmoz community behind me, offering encouragement at every turn. I particularly felt encouraged by Jen’s posts here, seeing how she also came from a development background. In fact, it was her posts that got me to register and start commenting.
I have two points of view, my original developer perspective which almost every single change I have done has been based from, and my new found SEO viewpoint, tracking those SERPs (and yes, SERP was never a term I had in my vocabulary!). I now have two months of Google Analytics history to use, and the steady increase in visitor percentages is nothing short of fantastic. I only wish I knew more on how to use it.
So to recap (and stop rambling!) I had four major updates: Relevant titles, improved meta descriptions, a much smoother and understandable checkout process and knowledge base, and much less marketing keyword spam, including hidden keywords. Almost all of which has shown nothing but a tangible benefit. My last remaining struggle is trying to show up on the first page again for those few “important” keywords my managers use as a baseline for gauging our performance against. Thankfully I have all of these extra sales and pages showing up in SERPs to use in my fight to say that removing the massive keyword spam is nothing but a benefit.
So to all you developers out there, what we know best is finding problems and fixing them. I knew nothing about SEO (I only recently in the last month discovered this site, oh how I wish I found it sooner!) so I went with what I knew, making the user experience better and more pleasant. And it worked! It had results I never expected and did not know to expect. The learning experience has been tremendous, and dare I say it, even fun at times!
You too, can develop for SEO. Take it from me, it’s not wasted time. Just take your time, and be consistent.
