One of my early sites that I began my SEO experimentations has finally reached page 1 of Google for a competitive term. The pages are generated by FrontPage. So the code is heavily bloated with redundant tags, excessive tables, and lots of paragraph and font formating. And it is an affiliate site. Lots going against it. Lots of back links from dirs, and a few good link exchanges from relevant sites. And heavy on page optimization (ie, borderline keyword spam and jam) are the main SEO elements. I sort of gave up on doing anymore SEO for this site about 6 months ago. It was number 1 on Yahoo for quite some time, beating out the industry leaders who I was affiliate marketing for. The term is one of the main generic descriptions of the niche. I gave up because even with top ranking on Yahoo the traffic was dismal and conversions low. So not really worth the effort to continue. Yahoo ranks have slipped a bit since. But now that it is on page 1 of Google (#8) I see that the traffic has more than doubled. I think domain age is starting to kick in giving me some trust factor. 1.5 years old. So I wonder if it is worth my time to clean up the code, add css to offload a lot of the formating to an external file, mask my aff links, get some more backlinks, etc. to see if it will bump it higher. Also to get page 1 for my secondary term (now page 3). I should really, at least, try to rewrite the copy so it sells better and improve conversions. I do suck at sales copy though.
Yeah this is a good point, I always use external css and apply rules to <p> and <h1> tages etc, therefore there hardly and coding in my pages, and lots of content, Im currently looking into css tables. lynda.com has a great css tutorial video, im currently on chapter 2 (just to brush up), would reccommend to people.
I would say keep pushing but only a little at a time. Now you need to show google that your site deserves to stay on that first page. Once other competiors get a look at this if they are smart they will start building more links to get their place back. And yes get more quality links pointing at your site, as you know seo is an on going thing so keep it up.
I believe converting the site to CSS will still help if it is a highly competitive market. Code to content ratio and other on-page optimization still works.
none... SEs don't really care about code... a little search engineer told me so... ha ha ha... while U are fixing code.. I am getting more back links... I win
Yeah, I was thinking that the code to content thing was a bit of a myth. Even if they do take it into consideration, it is very minor. As my brutally coded site goes to show.
Well, MC put it to bed earlier this fall in one of the famous Video sessions... so I leave it there Just because some one can't code W3C doesn't mean they do not have something of value to say.... at least that's what the G believes
Axe ... good to see you're moving up their buddy!!! Goood on yah! (BTW we should think about getting a DP get together happening. You're in Kamloops I'm in Calgary - I'm sure we have several other DP members in the region!)
There are a few in Vancouver and lower mainland. Probably a couple in Kelowna too. I'm sure there are a bunch more in Calgary. I cant do a get together over the holidays. I'm flying to east cost for a few weeks. Thanks for the words of encouragement.
Good code is nice for performance and maintance of websites not for SE rankings, think we all know by now links is what counts for that...