Online Marketing Today

BREAKING NEWS:

I received an email from a good friend of mine over the weekend. It contained a story that I thought all readers might find interesting.

It’s about a mate of his in the same industry who had his site redesigned which structurally altered the way in which the “content” of the site was displaying to the search engines. It resulted in big negative changes in his search engine rankings, which impacted visitor numbers and ultimately cut the websites income in half. Whoops.

I’ve highlighted the most important aspects you need to be aware of below;

“Hi Duncan…

I’ve a little story that may be useful to you. My pal has a site (Name & URL Removed For Privacy) which was quite popular and growing well. He’s absolutely genuine and the $1000 a month or so the site was making him was nearly enough for his simple lifestyle with his additional summer work. Homepage PR was 4 and his internal pages were well indexed and most had PR 2 or 3.

His site, however, was created using web studio and the code was awful. As the site grew it was becoming harder to maintain and updating menus etc was becoming a nightmare. Page weight was bad as well – web studio loaded separate images for each page instead of linking across to already stored images.

I felt he could solve his updating problem, reduce page weight and probably improve search engine optimization by a re-vamp. He was too busy (he works out in the cricket season) so he contracted some technical help.

Well they revamped the site, page weight was reduced by 60% and maintenance became a lot easier by the use of include files etc for menus.

However, they also added a tabbed menu and re-ordered how the content was displayed in the code.

In the first version, actual page content was high in the code whereas in their new version it appeared much lower down after a lot of internal links from the tabbed menu system the introduced.

The result was Google re-ranked all the pages downwards and his visitors from search engines began to plummet. From the upgrade to now he has seen a 50% drop in unique visitors and a similar drop in revenue – very serious stuff for someone in his position.

One other effect of this ‘upgrade’ was that adsense began to serve less relevant adverts – which tells me Google no longer knew what the pages were about.

When he told me of this (he’s a proud man and didn’t want me to feel I had to help him) I immediately applied the ‘table trick’ with a mass search and replace to re-order the content within the code which has slowed the rate of decline tremendously to near static.

I’m working with him now on a new template and site structure which we hope will restore his site to its previous levels and growth rates.

I thought it may be useful to you as there is an awful lot out there about links and so on but not so much about the importance of internal page structure and navigation. Have a good one…

John”

…whilst I’ll be publishing more detailed information about internal website optimization for better search engine rankings in the near future, the key things to highlight here are as follows…

Where ever possible, always include your actual “content” as close to the top of the HTML in a page as possible. By content I mean the actual body content that contains the majority of text - which in turn is going to include more of your critical keyword terms.

If you can trim the HTML of a page to remove any unnecessary code and/or shift code that is going to add little relevancy to your search engine rankings further down in the HTML then you should always aim to do this.

Don’t try to get too fancy with your navigational structure – in this case a tabbed menu system was introduced which I have no doubt was being generated using a lot of JavaScript.

At the end of the day Google (and the other major search engines) find it easier (and much prefer) basic text link navigational structures as they are easier for the spiders to crawl and follow.

Whilst many tabbed navigational structures (when you mouse over one link and a drop down menu appears displaying other links / categories etc) look nice, they are not ideal search engine optimization wise.

Thanks to John for sharing this story – I know this happens pretty often.

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