How SEO changed sukip!!
In this post I’m going to cover how SEO helped sukip, this is primarily for a designer.
If you’re a hardcore programmer then checkout my techies only SEO post (coming soon)
It all started when we decided that it’s time for SEO and Sumit sent me a book on SEO, he was buried deep in coding and I was done with the design so I took up SEO. Well it’s too early in the post but that’s where its place is, here goes the first learning
1. SEO should be well thought and planned even before the design, and then create a design to suit it. Never design first and then knit the SEO around it.
We made a big blunder by ignoring SEO at earlier stages in the website, if we had thought about it before the design we would be better than we currently are, but hey, that’s how you learn.
For a site like ours, we receive a lot of traffic from search engines and a major chunk from google, so optimizing the site becomes of prime importance to get more traffic, so I started off with SEO, it took some 15 days to optimize the major part of the website, i.e. the main pages and item pages and the results were really promising.
To get your hands wet on the internal details of optimizations, checkout my techies only SEO post (coming soon).
Here’s the outcome of the 15 days
1. 75% reduction in each web page’s size
2. 25% increase in CSS size
3. 50% decrease in JS size
4. A better design
5. HTML pages are so simple now that even a novice can understand what’s happening
Ok, the last point is what matters the most, ironic as it may seem but search engines are pure novices, because they can’t understand the nice smooth graphics or cool animations in flash. They just understand text, i.e. the page’s content and how it is organized.
Simple Example: Here are 4 variations of same text
Welcome, Prateek
Welcome, Prateek
Welcome, Prateek
Welcome, Prateek
Which one do you think is the best?
Well, there is no definite answer; it all depends on the keyword being searched for, suppose I search for Prateek then the chances of 3rd and 4th are better than 1st and 2nd because Prateek is written in bold. This is one example; there can be numerous such examples.
Also it depends a lot on the search engine algorithm; it may or may not give priority to bold text. But as far as I know google gives priority to different tags.
So something written in bulleted list carries more priority than something written simply under the body text.
2. Make sure your text is properly formatted and keep it as simple as possible, don’t keep anything except simple and plain tags in HTML, do all the fancy work in CSS
Another pain area in SEO is that these dumb search engines do not recognize javascript; they will simply ignore any script tag, so any fancy menus you design will completely be ignored, and it is not only the menu, it is your complete sitemap. Suppose you have a JS menu which is displayed across pages, the whole menu will be ignored and to the search engine, only your front page will be visible. This is another learning we had while doing SEO
3. Avoid JS as much as possible, specially in menus and make sure the base structure of your menu which spans across pages is in HTML
Once we were done with the optimizations we created a sitemap and submitted it to Google and yahoo. Doing this is very important because by doing this both these major search engines can cache your pages frequently, from what we have experienced Google caches our pages once every 3-4 days and this give us a lot of Google traffic. On Yahoo you have to manually resubmit the feed (sitemap) again and again whereas Google does it automatically whenever it feels like.
To know how to create and submit a sitemap checkout https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html
4. After the optimizations create a xml sitemap and submit it to both Google and yahoo
Once we did the optimization and submitted the sitemap to Google we posted some quality content on the website and voila we are there on the first page of Google.
As an example I will consider the sukip item “Pune’s ‘king of good times’ - Avinash Bhosale”, this item was posted on May 27 by a very loyal sukip user, I happen to chat with her and ask her the reason she posted this item, the reply I got was a simple one stating “I just came across this thing on Times of India, liked it and posted it”, it was something related to cars.
This item has shown explosive growth in terms of search engine traffic since it was posted, the keyword we will use is avinash bhosale which is a very generic keyword considering the item.
May 27 – Item posted
May 29 – Google caches the item; page unknown (came to know thru the keyword “avinash bhosale sukip”)
May 31 – promotion to page3 of google
June 1 – Page2
June 5 – Page1
June 7 – 1st result (above www.abgroupindia.com which is the official site of his group, his identity on the internet)
June 8 – Still the 1st result
The progress of this item has been phenomenal mainly due to the fact that avinash bhosale was in the news for sometime and people have been searching for “avinash bhosale” a lot.
But the fact that this item is the 1st result on the keyword “avinash bhosale” even above www.abgroupindia.com, means the page http://www.sukip.com/Others/Punes_king_of_good_times_Avinash_Bhosale is nicely optimized and filled with quality content.
The last but not the least
5. Keep quality content on the website
The points outlined in this post are purely from a designer’s point of view and I’m sure if any techie reads this, he/she will be bored but take my word, these are the basics of SEO.
More to come soon in my techies’ only post for SEO
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