Last time we set up the initial page, meta content, and added some images and adsense in for good measure. Today, we’ll review the site’s progress so far and add some changes and tweaks to improve its rankings!

Current Rankings

So I suppose we should start where we usually do, and that’s an update of how our 10 selected keyphrases are ranking now, and compared to how they were previously!

* Keyphrase – Current rank (previous rank) +/- change from previous rank
** N/A = Nothing At-all in the top 300

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104 (N/A) +196
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85 (N/A) +215
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76 (119) +43
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77 (N/A) +223
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15 (N/A) +285
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60 (116) +56
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – N/A (N/A) +/- 0

So a total of 1,018 ranks higher up than last time overall.. which is good, but none of the keyphrases are on the 1st page of Google yet, which is all that really matters – so there’s definitely still a lot of work to do.

Additional Rankings

Interestingly though, the site has pulled in a whole load of other keyphrases that we weren’t actually targetting, and is ranking pretty well for them. I’ve listed the top 5 below, their current rank, and how many searches (approx) those phrases get per month.

* Keyphrase – Current rank – Approx number of searches per month (keyworddiscovery)

• Staffies – 11 – 390
• Blue Staffies – 4 – 31
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17 – 106
• Blue Staffie – 8 – 18
• Blue Staffordshire Terriers – 11 – 12

Now if you compare that to the search volume of our initial keyphrases covered in part 1, that’s not bad at all. I also cross checked this list and ran it through the Google Adwords keyword tool, which seems to think that these keyphrases receive significantly (about 4 times) more searches per month.

Adapting Our Goals and Targets

Now the sign of a good SEO campaign is one that adapts to its environment, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. I’m going to swap out some of the keyphrases that are clearly going absolutely nowhere from our original list, and swap in these new phrase which we’re already doing well with, and could be seriously improved with a bit more of a push.

So here’s our new list below, the four which I’ve removed are all the ones which have been consistantly N/A since we’ve been tracking them, and I’ve added the top four new keyphrases from the above list.

* Keyphrase – Current Rank

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60
• Staffies – 11
• Blue Staffies – 4
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17
• Blue Staffie – 8

Changing and Tweaking The Site

At the moment, the site is actually performing ridiculously well in terms of Adsense revenue, since I launched it in October it’s made me about $100 with a clickthrough rate of 5%! (very high for adsense, average on my other sites is 1-2%).

The only problem with it is that I have a bit of a moral issue with it, I put Adsense to ‘help rankings’ not really to make money at all – and I personally hate sites like this one that are basically spam+adsense… so I fell bad poluting the internet even further. So to rectify this, I’m going to add more pages in an effort to give at least SOME value to users. In addition this should increase internal linking, which will help all pages, and increase how many pages we can have indexed.

The final thing which I’m going to do (have now done) is to convert the site to Wordpress. The reason for this is that Wordpress and Google are secret lovers, and a lot of my best ever SEO results have been from wordpress driven sites.

So here’s what it looks like now:

Notes On Wordpress

I used a free theme, no work required, and I’m only using two plugins: the all in one seo pack, and the google sitemap generator. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t need to be. The most important part is that I kept the homepage content the same, and the meta content the same. We really don’t want any adverse effects from switching the site into wordress.

I should also note that using the google sitemap generator plugin I installed Google webmaster tools, and added the sitemap URL to it.

What’s Next

Well I’ve spent far too much time on this today already so I haven’t actually added any new pages yet, but I will be getting Nikki onto some more copywriting for the site over the next few days and then we’ll check back soon(ish) to see what happens!

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Last time we looked at an introduction to this case study and did our keyphrase research to start optimising our brand new site: BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk. Today, we’ll go through the initial page construction and start putting together a stategy for improving the site’s ranking.

Since last time, I actually already put together the index page of the site, and have had it live for about two weeks. Because of this, it’s already been indexed! Here’s an update of how it’s ranking so far for our selected key phrases, nothing to spectacular so far but then nothing has been done yet so it’s actually a pretty good starting point.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier (N/A)
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier (119)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (116)
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (N/A)

Coding Up The Header of Index Page

As I mentioned last time, we’re going to keep this very simple and not focus on the design of the page at all.

The first thing which I sat down to define was the meta content, I wanted to include as many of my keyphrases (and variations/combinations there of) as possible, without coming across too spammy.

Here’s the meta content used:

• Title: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Description: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier pictures, stories and information! Loads of great blue staffordshire bull terrier help and information.
• Keywords: blue staffordshire bull terriers, staffordshire bull terriers, staffies, staffy bull terriers, staffordshire bull terrier, blue staffordshire bull terrier, staffordshire, bull terrier

The title is 69 characters long, which is actually 4 characters over the recommended limit but as you can see in the screenshot above Google has indexed and does display the full title.

The description is 135 characters, which is about 15 characters below the recommended limit, I might add a little more to this later but for now it’s a good starting point.

There are on 8 keywords. So few places care about or even bother to look at meta keywords that if you want the ones who do pay attention to take any notice then you’d better be as un-spammy as possible.

The Rest of The Page

The rest of the page is quite simple, I got my partner Nikki to write up around 800 words on staffordshire bull terriers and I put all the paraphraphs in <p> tags, using appropriate headings and subheadings going down the page, starting with <h1> all they way down to <h6>. Thats it, litererally, and that got the site indexed though granted not highly – let’s move on to the changes for today.

Here’s the page as of the initial coding 2 weeks ago:

What’s Next?

Well my good friend Tony has had a lot of success putting Google Adsense on pages which he wants to be indexed quickly. This isn’t something that I’ve tried before but it makes sense if you think about it; Google want to give their advertisers exposure so it would only make sense to look on them more favourably. Either way, we’re going to give this a try so I’ve just inserted a couple of bits of adsense on the page.

Emphasising Words

You can use <em></em> and <strong></strong> tags to indicate which part of a page is important, or which part of it should be ‘emphasised’ to search engines. A lot of people go overboard with this and there’s more bold text than there is normal text! So don’t do that!

I’ve picked a couple of key phrases out of the page and put <strong></strong> tags on them.

Images

Google is pretty clever, and while it can’t SEE images, it does value their alt attributes and it’s fair to say that Google probably knows that a page which has image is of more use to searchers than a similar page without images.

I’ve added a couple of pictures of Herbie (my staffy) with appropriate alt attributes again relating to the subject of the page and the subject of the image. More on opimising alt attributes here.

The two images (as you can see) are the same, but they have different file names and alt attributes, so it doesn’t matter, they are different enough. They are different sizes for a reason, consider Google Image Search, where google takes images size into account; I’m providing a little diversity.

Outbound Linking

This is a hot topic of debate amongst some but I am a firm and strong believer that linking out to high quality websites (with high PR) strengthens your own. So I’m going to drop some links in to places like Wikipedia and the BBC.

Installing Stats

This again is questionable, but some believe that using Google Analytics again makes Google look more favourably on your site because you’re sending them free information. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but I’ve installed it anyway (alon with Webmaster Tools) so that we’ll be able to track the site’s stats, keyphrase related and otherwise.

And finally..

Inbound Linking

Over the next few days I’m going to start grabbing a couple of decent-PR links in to the site to hopefully pass over some pagerank and additional “juice” to the site.

And here’s the page now that we’re done with it for the day:

What Do You Think?

What else do you do personally when optimising the code on a brand new site, are there any things that I’ve forgotten or that you would have done different? Let me know in the comments below!

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So I’ve decided to do a multi-part case study, I’m going to start a new (very simple and un-pretty) website, and I’m going to document every change and piece of work that I carry out on it. Along with each post, I’m going to document benchmarks of where 10 keyphrases rank, and their movement, along with traffic statistics based on organic traffic. I think this will (maybe) be both fun and educational.

Let’s Get Started

The first thing to decide is what the site is going to be about, this was relatively simple (for once) as I didn’t need to think of something particularly catchy or memorable – it’s purely meant to appeal to search engines. So, I have a very sweet Staffordshire Bull Terrier who is what’s known as a ‘blue’ variety of the breed (basically grey, the Kennel Club just make up fancy names). Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers are generally quite rare and highly sought after, so at least it’s something that I can write some interesting content about.

Step 1 – Register a Domain Name

As mentioned, I have no interest in having a short and catchy domain, and I don’t need any company branding. So I’ve gone for a nice keyphrase-full domain, and picked up: http://www.BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk

Step 2 – Do Keyphrase Research

I usually use KeywordDiscovery for my keyphrase research, but recently I’ve also found that the Google Adwords keyphrase tool has actually also proven to be quite useful. I’m going to keep it simple and only collect keyphrase data for ’staffordshire bull terrier’ and ‘blue staffordshire bull terrier’ and their derivatives. So I’ll be working from a list of about 40 and narrowing it down to 10. (Usually I’m working from a final list of 10,000 to be narrowed down to about 400, true story).

Here are the KeywordDiscovery results for “staffordshire bull terriers”

and again for “staffordshire bull terrier”

Interestingly, VERY skewed numbers in favour of the singular form rather than the plural. Also higher search volumes than I anticipated, this could be harder than I first imagined (oops).

Step 3 – Produce a Final List of Key Phrases

So, based on the above lists, here are the 10 which I’m going to go for.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers

I’ve ordered them (as I always do) with the most searched key phrase at the top, and the least searched at the bottom. This works under the assumption that a key phrase which is searched for most in a month, will have the most competition for the top spot, and as such will be most difficult to rank for. The goal is to work your way up from the bottom of the list to the top.

Step 4 – Research The Competition

Obviously if I’m going to rank for any of these phrases then I need to know who I’m up against, so it’s time to google each one of the above key phrases and see what comes up.

Here are the results of the most common sites that appeared in the top 3

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier
• www.staffords.co.uk/
• www.staffybullterriers.com/
• www.sbtfun.com/
• www.k9puppy.co.uk/Puppies/StaffordshireBullTerrierforsale.aspx
• www.epupz.co.uk/search/puppies_for_sale.asp?area=all&st=1&breed=Staffordshire%20Bull%20Terrier
• www.bluestaffy.co.uk/

K9Puppy and ePupz (as you might expect) are puppy classified sites, they rank well for pretty much every dog breed name under the sun because they have high Page Rank, and frequently updating content.

Wikipedia is going to be a tough one to beat, but luckily it only showed up on one of the 10 key phrases’ search results, but there also several positive things that we can use this page for. (more to follow)

As for the rest, they’re staffy-fansites. They aren’t well designed, they don’t have any remarkable features (or PR) and the only thing that they really have going for them is domain-name age.

I’m confident that these competitors aren’t a major concern, the ones that I’m most worried about are the money-laundering god-foresaken puppy selling websites.

Step 5 – Play The Waiting Game

The most boring part of all. Wait for your domain registration to go through, then point the domain to the right nameservers, and wait again for it to propagate. If you’re like me and you get bored and frustrated then you might like to check out this tool, which tracks your domain’s progress and sends you an email once it’s finished propagating. (Which I think is rather cool)

Stay tuned for next time, when I’ll be putting together the index page and coding the html for it. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

So, do you think this is going to be a success? Or a dramatic failure? Let me know in the comments!

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