SEO Efforts Pay Off!

Posted on 08. Nov, 2006 by Carolyn Shelby in SEO/SEM

Several months ago, I checked Lafayette Online’s rank in Google and almost cried. I had dropped from #3 or #4 (where I’d been pretty steadily for years) to #7.

Since then, I’ve been going over the code and reading everything I’ve been able to find on improving one’s site to be nicer to the bots and to increase keywords and relevancy, etc. All white hat, nothing underhanded or tricky — I focused on writing better descriptions for meta tags and alt tags, made sure all of the code passed validation, rewrote the page to eliminate as many tables as possible with CSS, and added in some new RSS feeds to encourage people to display news from Lafayette Online on their blogs.
I am VERY pleased to announce that Lafayette Online has not only moved up from #7, but it’s overtaken the Journal and Courier, the Convention of Visitors Bureau and even the Purdue University site for the #2 result for Lafayette Indiana on Google. The only site ahead of it now is the official city site… so they’re the new target. If I can overtake that site and be #1, I will be a very happy camper.

Google Results Page for keywords Lafayette and Indiana

Popularity: 9% [?]

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5 Responses to “SEO Efforts Pay Off!”

  1. Caydel’s SEO Blog » Congratulations, CShel

    10. Nov, 2006

    [...] CShel, a webmaster friend of mine, has noticed some great movement in the Google SERPS for her site about Lafayette, Indiana. She’s been putting a lot of work into the SEO aspects of the site over the last number of months, and it’s great to see that she’s been rewarded for it. Once again, Congratulations, CShel – hope you get number 1! bloggingBookmark to: [...]

  2. Caydel

    10. Nov, 2006

    Congratulations CShel!

  3. Noel

    29. Nov, 2006

    Is there any special techniques that can be used to optimize a wordpress blog on my server for SEO. One issue I see is no way to change the title tags on each page, where it seems to take the blog name for the home page.
    I have several hundred 600+ inbound links.
    I have pinged Technorati manually and used pingoat as well as pingomatic every time I add a new blog.
    There is plenty of content, about 30 articles.
    What else can I do? What else should I do to optimize my blog?

  4. Andy Beard

    02. Dec, 2006

    What a coincidence, Noel managed to post exactly the same comment to my blog on 29th Nov as well, and Spam Karma just happened to mention he posted in less than 10 seconds of entering the page.

    For Lafayette Online I noticed there were quite a few pagerank leaks for various buttons that should really use nofollow, plus I am sure your tell-a-friend and a few other pages don’t need to receive so much love.

    Lots of link condoms on things not pointing to your content might get you that top spot.

    You might find this post useful

    http://andybeard.eu/2006/12/nofollow-and-pink-boxes.html

  5. carolyn

    10. Dec, 2006

    Hey Andy:

    I checked the script for the social bookmarking thingies and it says it’s adding in a nofollow to each of those links. If they’re not showing up pink, I’m not sure why.

    As for Lafayette Online, I’m willing to give it a try and see if it makes a big difference. If it does, I’ll let you know! :-)

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