Digital Overload’s technical blog

From the start of November we’ve been working to climb the ranks of Google. This document details all the steps we’ve taken thus far to improve our ranking with and the effects these steps have had on our position.

Our SEO strategy

First of all we’re keen to show that you don’t need hidden content and custom search engine landing pages to get a good ranking. We intend to get a high natural search ranking with NO underhand techniques. Search engines are designed to find content relevant to your search term, by tricking them you are just making the results more inaccurate for other users and spoiling their web experience. This is why if and when a search engine finds out you’ve been deceiving them you are penalised and often banned. In our opinion the only way to achieve a consistently high ranking site is with good honest content. This forms the crux of our SEO strategy. On our main site we’ve made an effort to include as much relevant content to the user without it turning in to an essay. The blog forms another major part of our site content and it’s our hope that with enough decent blog entries we can generate a reasonable number of backlinks - the blog entries need to contain decent content though which will require time and effort - web karma.

Where we our now

As of today (10th December 2007) we are ranked in the following positions:

• 2nd for “digital agency norwich”
• 209th for “digital agency”
• 25th for “technical agency norwich”

Norwich, in case you aren’t aware is the city we’re based in. Due to the amount of competition for “digital agency” we decided to focus on searches specific for our city. If we climb the ranks for “digital agency” too then that’s a bonus.

The story so far

So far we have been focusing on appropriate back links. This is normally in the form of articles written for other sites and their users. We have been tweaking our keywords and meta-data and yesterday we were ranked 5th for “digital agency norwich” showing that a little trial and error can go a long way.

Here is a list of what we did from day one to get our rank:

1. Create a semantically marked up site
2. Create a simple site map
3. Hide duplicate content from search engines using robots.txt
4. Tweak page titles and add in meta keywords and descriptions
5. Ensure all site content is relevant to keywords and titles
6. Remove duplication from meta data
7. Create a blog
8. Write articles that people will find useful, link to and tell people about
9. Post on relevant forums

Ok so thats an overview of what we’ve done. We cannot really go into to much detail about our current back links and forum posts as we are not sure how many there are and Google takes a little while to update. With forum posts, always include your signature so people can take a look at your site.

What we’ve avoided

We’ve made an effort not to replicate page titles and meta-data across multiple pages. The worst thing we could do would be to have every page title the same, what’s preferable is a title relevant to the page the user is on, for example take a look at our Email Campaigns page - it’s title is “Email development and campaign delivery systems - Digital Overload”, I think this describes the page well with no “keyword stuffing”. Also notice that we put the company name at the end of the title, there are two reasons for this: 1) From an accessibility point of view it’s important to present the unique page title to your user as soon as possible. If you’re using a screenreader for example it’s annoying for sure to hear the company name at the start of every page you visit (though it is important that it’s there). 2) It’s been reported that the words towards the start of the title are given more weight by search engines so it’s important for these to be unique to the page.

There’s a temptation to comment on as many blogs as possible with the intention of gaining a backlink. Don’t. Most blogs will add in rel=”nofollow” to each anchor in the comments automatically so Google won’t pay any attention to them anyway - if the comments are moderated then the chances are that the moderator will see what you’re up to and delete the post anyway.

Forum posting however is one way to earn yourself brownie points and gain backlinks! Just make sure your posts are relevant and helpful, responding to someone’s request for help with “Well, good luck with that.” does not constitute a helpful post.

What next?

From this point on we’ll keep track of any amends and changes we make to our site and details of changes to our rank and thoughts on all of this! Watch this space.