Sonet Journal

You have a great looking website, stimulating content, excellent inbound links, the site has been doing really well and you’ve had the edge on your competitors. Suddenly you find the website slipping down the search engine ladder for no good reason at all. Nothing has really changed with your competitors except for a few minor alterations, what went wrong?

Old Technology: Depreciated Code

A largely overlooked facet of search engine optimisation strategy is the coding of a website. If a site is using old and outdated code it can have a detrimental effect on the overall outlook of a site. The importance of re-coding a website cannot be overlooked. Recently at Southbourne Internet we made the decision to re-design the entire website, the new site will go live sometime in March 2006, in the meantime we opted for a re-coding of the existing site. What prompted us were several issues including a swift drop in our own rankings, wanting to make the website W3C standard compliant.
We could see no reason why we should have dropped considering our content was more up to date than most of our competitors. Somehow we had either ‘tripped a filter’ or just got caught up in the grind of a search engines latest algorithm, it happens to the best of us. We analysed and probed the So-Net website including looking at our back-links, while a medium sized number were all quite good, we had taken no part in any reciprocal linking schemes except for exchange some links with good websites that our clients or visitors would find useful. We knew it couldn’t be that.

Another reason for coding was to make our website more accessible. This should be first on the list for any site owner. After all it makes not only makes for good business ethics to be accessible, by having an inaccessible website you are locking out an important sector of the market.

We re-coded the entire website to XHTML and replaced all tables with dives. We then tweaked the content and images and bought the site to W3C validation including WAI, Level AAA, XHTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) compliancy.

Within 48 hours our site started to climb again in the search engines, By dropping the tables we had created a clear path through our content and made life easier for the search engine ‘bots’ and more important our site was cross browser friendly working with the top browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox and Safari this meant it was also working smoothly for screen readers. Call it co-incidence, but we have many good content sites with clean coding taking more and more top positions.

With reaching these standards we now have a site that works perfectly well on mobile Smartphone’s. As Google has recently announced that it will index websites for its new small mobile search engine and only sites that have no tables and are XHTML compliant. These sites have a better chance of ranking high and being viewed by all visitors to the mobile web.
Mobile web design and optimisation is another path we have explored and now making inroads to bring this into our product portfolio.

Like any good technology it progresses and evolves and the web is the perfect example of this. Coding becomes obsolete after a while and what was once well written validated coding can become undone over a period of time with updates to content, constant search engine tweaking and optimisation.

A good search engine optimisation strategy should always include a thorough look at the current coding in a website and make the necessary adjustments to the code or request to redevelop the client’s current website.

SEO is a lot more than pointing a load of links and writing content for the site. The absolute re-working of the content, coding adjustments, image manipulation, meta-data should and does play a strong role in search campaigns. By validating and keeping your code up-to-date, not only gives you an edge with a large margin above your competitors, it’s also lightens your work load later and simplifies the process of any future tweaking to the site.

One of the services we offer at So-Net is red project solutions for SEO and web development. This means that we are generally called in to rescue sites that have a variety of problems from poor or inappropriate website architecture, this includes sites that have been built by unscrupulous web firms that have taken the money and left the client with a website that doesn’t perform or was not scoped properly for its effectiveness in its given market. These sites not only come from web firms but SEO’s who have usually ‘suckered’ the client into buying their services and did nothing more than fill a few pages with keywords that points a load of ‘useless free directory links’ without first scoping the project correctly.

The sad fact is we see these clients more frequently than not. They are at a loss, some angry, some very upset that they put their livelihoods in the hands of what I can only describe as ‘crack-doctors’ our job is to give them the facts and what has gone wrong. We don’t sit there and torpedo the companies or individual who ‘shafted them’ the clients already know this and have a few choice words of their own. We do offer them however a glimmer of hope, everything can be undone and a solution worked out, unfortunately it comes down to budget and having to spend more to undo and correct gross mistakes and incompetence of the previous work.

Here is an example of a clients website and livelihood getting ‘second-hand treatment’ we went to see a new customer two weeks after a request and recommendation from a colleague.

Mike has a service where he finds and locates businesses for sale on behalf of clients who are looking to invest or buy a business. He also sells businesses online on behalf of customers wishing to sell. Mike relies heavily on being in the top natural listings of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. His website has been online since 1998 and has slowly built up to reasonable positions. The problem is Mike’s website was quite old and using old and out of date architecture with poor graphic work and it was no longer rendering properly in some of the latest browser updates such as Internet Explorer 6, Opera 8 and Firefox. Mike had previously built this site himself with the help of a 14 year old nephew. He had come to realise that his website is his shop window and needed an overhaul. He was not wrong in thinking a good website design with modern site architecture and validated coding would increase his search engine rankings further. He had put some money aside for this and decided to invest in a new website that would do all these things and would also allow him to update his website. He found a ‘web development company’ and they agreed to build him a site with a content management system that would allow him to upload content and images whenever he wanted without any knowledge of technical coding and keep his website validated to W3C standards. The site would be search engine friendly. He hired an ‘SEO consultant’ who claimed he would move the earth for him to get those top positions.

When the project was delivered the client seemed quite happy with look and feel of the website, the SEO consultant delivered his optimisation services and an inbound linking campaign. Then a week later Google went through one of it’s updates and mike’s new site that had replaced the old actually disappeared from page one of Google for a high key-phrase and dropped to page eleven. It all went downhill quite rapidly and the client had spent six thousand with the web firm and another three thousand with the SEO consultant. He then went to both companies and demanded answers; they blamed each other and then blamed Google!

What Went Wrong?

We went to see Mike who was in need of some serious anger management (quite understandably) we had already prepared an analysis of his website and we delivered the verdict.

Neither of the two companies had scoped the client’s project in anyway at all and gone ahead and took the money and ran. The web firm had given a off-the-shelf content management system (not the bespoke one they claimed they could build) and they had built a front end that not only did not validate to it’s Doc header but it’s navigation system was entirely in Flash, the text was also flash based. Search engines do not read flash based websites. No matter what you are told they simply can’t, the reason is that any flash based text will show up as a flash image. The only thing he was able to do with the CMS was upload images and make changes to his text on his contact and copyright pages which is totally useless to him.

The SEO consultant had not even bothered to advise the web firm (who probably would not have listened anyhow) and had implemented a page on the site for reciprocal links. The SEO had then bought in reciprocal links that were from free directories that demanded a link back. Most of these directories were ‘off-subject matter’ and had nothing to do with the clients business at all. He had about four paid directories that even still he was giving them reciprocal links. There were links from online pharmacies that were selling Valium and other drugs and in turn had back links from adult sites. The client was linking to these sites and in turn the clients’ site was slipping away down the search engine pole.

The Solution

We built a new solution for the client (it meant spending more money) we scoped the project for the client and implemented a CMS and built a XHTML front end that validated to W3C standards. We added fresh text based search engine copy and made his site more of a resource for his visitors by adding in a news feed for property buying and business sales.

For the SEO solution we took down the reciprocal links and bought in one way links that were completely relevant to his business from property sales websites and directories. Each inbound link was carefully investigated for its own quality inbound links and it’s unique C-Class Block and IP address. We implemented a resources links page and had the client link to sites that his audience would find useful. We then wrote to Google and told them the story, though they generally don’t admit there is anything going on, it does make them aware that things have been corrected. They wrote back and pointed out their guidelines for webmasters, it’s a standard response but still quite effective, it tells you they have seen the email and it tells you that sites do not get penalised if they keep to the set of rules that have been set out for webmasters to use as a guideline.

Mike’s site today has now gone from its page eleven position to page two in a matter of a week, as we continue to optimise the website and implement an online advertising campaign his site will reach his much sought after number one position.

Standards

More then ever, there needs to be some sort of standards in the SEO industry, I’m not talking about a bunch of SEM’s and SEO’s meeting at a conference and paying merely lip service to this, or SEO firms working at odds against each other to see who can be the first to implement good industry standards, all that does is creates division and duplication. What is needed is a body such as the W3C to come together with the best minds in the industry and lay the groundwork for best practises.

Enough said!