Getting into Google

…or why I no longer get 257 hits a month for Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

I’ve had a web site for a long, long time (by web standards). I launched my first site in 1996. At the time, the thinking was the shorter your domain name, the better. I wanted ltdesign.com, but that was taken, so I settled for elteedesign.com (say it out loud and it will make sense).

Here’s my first ever web site, circa 1996:

Terrible, I know, but this was 1996. This was followed in quick succession by these (much better, but still very old) site designs:

1997

1998 (this one had a matching business card)

Also 1998 (I had more time on my hands back then)

That one had a matching business card, too. The red and white theme worked for me, so with the release of this website design, in 2000, I stopped redesigning my own site for seven years.

Instead of redesigning each year, I learned more HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. I updated my site again and again until I decided that I had taken that site design as far as I could. It was time to hop on the redesign horse. But while I was at it, I was going to make some global site changes — changes that I knew were going to drop my Google result rankings considerably. Scary stuff.

First of all, I had been tracking my site statistics for a few years using AWStats. (And if you have a site yourself, you should be following your own site stats, too. It’s an invaluable tool for web site design and maintenance and I’m always amazed at the number of people who never look at their stats. How do they know how their site is performing? But that’s a topic for another blog entry…) I had been building my site traffic every month, and at the time of my redesign my unique visitors were ranging at around 1,100 per month. That’s OK (although more would have been better), but I wasn’t translating much of that traffic into clients. Why? Looking closer at my stats, I saw that I was getting about 2/3 of my Google search hits for the phrase “brochures samples”. And when I did the search myself, I saw I was ranking 11th for that term (worldwide! It was momentarily very exciting). But I almost never updated that page on my site (too busy), and all of my samples were outdated. Also, it appeared that although I was getting a lot of hits for that phrase, those searchers weren’t looking to hire a designer.

My second most popular search phrase was Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Lots of Google traffic from that search. You see the problem? Yes, I did have a Sabrina the Teenage Witch book cover sample on my site, as I had designed that book while I was freelancing at Simon & Schuster, but it didn’t seem like those visitors were interested in my design skills. I think I must have had a large population of pre-teens who were pretty disappointed to end up on my site.

My site was search engine optimized, no doubt, because I was getting lots of search engine traffic. But (and this is a huge but) it wasn’t optimized for the right search terms. The Google algorithm is very complex, but basically there are 5 main things that go into your search engine ranking:

1. What is the content of your site, and how much content does your site have?
2. How many visitors does your site get?
3. What other sites are linked to your site and how much traffic do they get?
4. How often is your site updated? (A blog, in fact, this blog, is great for all content issues. I highly recommend one if you’re looking to get into Google.)
5. How long has your site been around?

I was doing OK on 1-3 and 5 of this list, although I almost never updated toward the end of this version’s 7 year run. So here’s what I did to get better rankings for the search terms I wanted to be listed for:

1. I changed my domain name from elteedesign.com to leslietanedesign.com. No more explaining “It’s LT, spelled out. You know E-L-T-E-E. No, two e’s. Well, really three….” I kept elteedesign.com and directed it to the new domain name. I also bought the domain names leslietane.com and leslietanedesigns.com and redirected them as well. I am a big believer in covering your bases with alternate domain names (more on that in another post, too.)
2. I changed the page titles on all of my pages to include my new keywords (Western Mass graphic design, web design Easthampton MA, and many more).
3. I added whole new sections to this site: a glossary, lots of new pages (chock full of keywordy goodness), and this blog.
4. For about 6 months, I spent 1-2 hours a month linking to my site from graphic design sites, networking sites, and directory sites. If the site got lots of traffic and was relevant to graphic design (or at least not not relevant), I linked myself in.
5. I added custom 404 and other error pages. No more letting those misdirected hits slip away!
6. I also redesigned the entire site, to better reflect the kind of work I am doing now (which is hopefully light years ahead of what I was doing 7 years ago)

The result? At first I lost about 3/4 of my web traffic. I knew this would happen, but still, eeek! It was a huge bummer.

Slowly, though, my traffic began to come back, and I got more and more hits from Google again, but this time for my new search terms. I’m up over 1200 unique visitors a month (more than my best month before the redesign), and I’ve been getting more proposal requests in a week than I used to get in a month.

So yay redesign. Yay search engine optimization. And yay fewer pre-teens looking for Sabrina on my pages.

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