Client experiences to help understand how search engines work for you and against you.

Client Experiences (Good and Bad)

Client experiences can be some of the best examples of both the good and bad things that can effect search engine evaluation and the resulting ranking. The good things that can happen are usually small and make you feel good for a short time, but tend not to keep your site at the top for very long unless you are willing to pay for your position. On the other hand, when bad things happen, they can be devastating and it can take a long time, sometimes a very long time to recover and some sites never do.

In this example of the good things that can be gained, we have a client that came to us wanting to promote their e-commerce site and attempt to get better rankings on the search engines. The first thing we did was to evaluate the basics as described here and determine what things needed to be changed in the overall structure of the site, site content and meta-tags. They had a good starting point because their domain name was registered early, so their site had been up for many years. Most search engines take into account how long you have had your domain name and how long a site has been up for that domain name. By adding some carefully chosen meta-tags and altering the content of the main page, we gave the search engines something new to evaluate for the site and initially moving them up a few notches. Since they were already in the top 50 on most engines, it took some time to see the upward movement.

Secondly, they were interested in exploring the possibility of Pay-Per-Click and how that would help generate more traffic to the website and therefore creating more online sales. At that time, Overture was the only Pay-Per-Click service that offered a promising way to increase the visibility of the site and achieve the click-thru's. We helped them sign up for Overture and explained the process of "bidding" for placement on keywords and turned the day to day monitoring over to them. After a few weeks of working with the program they had determined what was the best time to have it running and how to spend the least to get the most for the click-thru's that were coming to the website. A great side effect of doing Pay-Per-Click is the added exposure the website gets from the search engines and before long, we started to see that using the Pay-Per-Click service was also bringing up the numbers to even better rankings.

Over the course of six to eight months, they saw their site rise into the top 30 on most engines and into the top 10 on a couple. This is great news, because as traffic increases, online sales tend to grow, but much of the success is fleeting and if you don't keep up with the Pay-Per-Click or you don't keep putting in new content from time to time, your site tends to start to slowly drop in the rankings.

In this example of how bad things can occur, it becomes very obvious that if you do the wrong things, the results can be devastating to your website rankings on the search engines. One day, not to long ago, I get a call from one of our clients. In a panic, he explains that they have not received any requests for quotes from their website in the last few days. They are a small company here in Nebraska and a large number of their clients are not in Nebraska and would not have found them if it weren't for the leads generated from their website which had great search engine rankings for the search terms they were using. I examined the site and on the surface, I did not see anything that looked out of place. So I asked if they had done anything recently to the website. The response was "not recently, but a few weeks ago, we had a volunteer help us add a few things to some of our pages". As I checked further into the problem, I realized that their "volunteer" had rewritten several of the pages including the main page (index.htm) and in the process, had eliminated ALL of their meta-tags. No title, No description, No keywords, all gone. As a result, once the search engines had revisited the site, the only thing they had to work with was the page content and that is just not enough to maintain a top 10 ranking on any search engine.

Once I explained the situation, the obvious question comes to mind: "Can you fix it?" I explained that I had already "fixed" it, meaning that I had replaced the meta-tags from backup copies of the site that we had, but that it was up to the search engines to re-evaluate the site and put them back in the upper positions. I suggested getting signed up with Inktomi as a way to do this in the quickest most efficient way, which they did. Before the problem, they had top 20 rankings in almost all of the engines. After the problem, they had virtually dropped off of most of the engines and the few engines that still had the site had put them in below the 100th position. Since they rely so much on the web traffic to generate their business, this was a huge slowdown in their sales. After just a few weeks with Inktomi, they were back in the top 100 on all the engines and as high as the 60's in some. Within a few months, they regained several top 30 rankings, but it is unlikely that they will ever regain the amount of top 10 ratings that they had before the mishap.

These are just two examples of how search engines can effect the way your website works (or doesn't). Both are lessons in what to do and what not to do when you are trying to get better rankings for your website.