Recently we have been asked to perform a SEO project on a site and during our investigation into what work had been performed previously we found that the previous ‘SEO’ had been trying but not achieving anything in terms of ranking increases or visitor number improvements. We found that previous exchanges had taken place between a client and his previous so-called ‘seo’ that are detailed below.
The website was redesigned and put live 3 months previous to this conversation with Google caching the site a week before this exchange:
site owner question: Now that you have optimised the website can you give me your opinion on where the site now sits in the search engines now. Although it’s the summer season and its high business season, our search position hasn’t improved and our website inquiries have dropped off. Can you give me your comments please
answer: Hard to say as Google is still not displaying all the content from the new website in the search results. [our comment: erm…. it is actually] Your website was static for so long Google are not rushing to get this spidered. Nothing we can do apart from sit and wait. [our comment: yes sit and wait always a good one!] Maybe change the content on the home page? [our comment: yes why not ! or just sit and wait? 🙂 ]
site owner question: I gave you a list of towns, cities, and a couple of counties that are our main target areas that I looked at that we appear on some pages well near the top and others several pages later, why is there such a discrepancy and can this be rectified
answer: I have put the towns and villages into the website, but unfortunately there is no guarantee of where you will come. Nothing can be guaranteed on Google. Even if a company says they can get you to page 1 they are lying. [our comment: really ? always?] The trouble is someone may optimise their site heavily for just one of those areas as they only need to perform with 1 search term and they will beat you every time. As stated before, once Google displays your site correctly things will change, however they still display your old text which doesn’t appear anywhere on the new site [our comment: the seo believes as the text in the site snippet isnt now on the site that it hasnt been crawled since the site redesign, the site has been crawled and re-indexed and the site snipped is from the dmoz directory]*
*To ensure your site doesn’t pickup meta data from your dmoz listing you have to include the meta data meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”
