Case studies in SEO

By tids

By Simon van Wyk

Search engine optimisation can make a huge difference to the way your site ranks on search engine result pages – and therefore will directly affect your traffic. And most experts engaged to develop a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy for any website will follow a similar process.

First, what is your site about? Understand who your customer is, what they are looking for – and which keywords will lead them to you. But while keyword research is a critical early step, lots of other factors contribute to SEO.

A site audit will examine what works – and what doesn’t work – on your current website. It’s surprising what a difference a few small changes can make. Appropriate title tags on each page, useful meta-description tags and descriptive titles throughout can really help your site ranking.

While these sound like basic, simple tips, the case studies below (two bad, one good) show how some of the highest profile sites in the world were able to improve their ranking following a straightforward SEO audit.

Search Engine Land: Bill Gates Blog

Tech journalist and editor of the hugely influential ‘Search Engine Land’ site, Danny Sullivan, took a mischievous look at Bill Gates’ personal blog recently – and used it to demonstrate some basic search engine optimisation techniques that could really improve the results for the Microsoft founder and chairman.

When Sullivan did his case study on Gates’ blog back in January this year, the site was number four on Google, sharing the page one space with plenty of spoof blogs.

Now? Well, it seems Gates has taken Sullivan’s advice to heart; Bill Gates’ blog is now ranked number one on Google.

Sullivan suggested that Gates use the word “official” in his blog title to distinguish it from the parody sites. He also advised Gates to create a succinct meta-description tag and make sure each of his pages had a distinct title. Make sure each blog post has a unique, descriptive title, Sullivan added – and make sure those titles will still make sense out of context, if somebody links to you.

Try the special free webmaster tools offered by Google and Bing, advises Sullivan.

And finally, it’s time for Bill to build some reputation, get some links – and keep using Twitter.

Barack Obama: Yes, he did!

The marketing gurus over at DWSmg.com analysed the US President’s campaign site in 2008 and concluded that his web team did an outstanding SEO job. Despite extensive resources actively working to dislodge him, searching for the keywords “Barack” and “Obama” in four major search engines returned his presidential campaign website at the top of the search results.

The home page opened with a data collection splash (optimised for keywords), then each subsequent page boasted a different, descriptive title and carefully-developed header tags were distributed throughout a site that was constantly updated with useful content.

Every image on the site included descriptive Alt-tag descriptions. And through judicious spending on pay-per-click and sponsored listings, Obama’s team captured most keywords related to the presidential election campaign. A team of active bloggers continuously posted relevant articles, with some posts receiving more than 300 comments in their first hour of posting. Integrating SEO with Facebook and LinkedIn helped the tech-loving new president capture an even larger audience.

Google Fail

Google spokesman and search engineer Matt Cutts put together a tongue-in-cheek case study of the SEO of the company’s own websites – and delivered a less-than-favourable report. Without a dedicated SEO expert working on their own sites, the company didn’t score very well on meta-description tags, consistent internal links, and title tags. One section even used copied (and wrong) page descriptions from a completely different section. Duplicate URLs abounded, there were bad site links and a random ALT tag appeared at the top of one particular page. Title tags – which are a great opportunity to include keywords – were not used well.

“A simple SEO audit has really made a big difference,” he says – and he recommended site owners go to the Google webmaster section and download their basic SEO guide.

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