Chapter 5: A Case Study - SEO in action

Before reading further, make sure you've read Chapter 4 of Quirk's eMarketing 101 guide.

Client: City Lofts Group PLC
Digital Agency: Reflector Interactive
URL: http://www.citylofts.co.uk
Category: Real-estate/Investment Property

The Problem

Despite being online for more than six years, the City Lofts website was suffering from a number of fairly common problems:

Lack of visibility on Search Engines
Too little traffic, mostly due to being pretty much "invisible" to web searchers
This resulted in an insufficient return on website creation costs, since a website that cannot be found, cannot add value

The Solution

With a site redesign already in the pipeline, the client was made aware of the importance of Search Engine Optimisation. As such, it was felt that the new site's development should include a comprehensive SEO component.

An analysis of the initial situation, with concerns relating to search engine visibility and overall traffic statistics laid the foundation for an effective SEO strategy:

Analyse initial website, find problems with Spiderability and areas where basic SEO techniques should be put in place
Identification of barriers

Development process

Mock-ups of the new site design were sent through from the client's designers to the SEO strategist so that he could:

Analyse mock-up designs and compile a complete SEO Recommendations Document to act as a directive medium for the developers and designers of the website
This SEO Document provided information and instructions with regard to:
- Removal of JavaScript coding from a webpage and moving it to an external .js file
  Example:
  <script type="text/javascript" src="javascript_file.js></script>
- Implementing robots.txt file
  Add a file to your root folder named robots.txt. The URL of this file should be www.yoururl.com/robots.txt Add the following to your robots.txt file to allow all crawlers to crawl all your pages
  User-agent: *
  Disallow:
- Setting up initial redirects of previous URL's to new URL's.
  For Apache servers, add this to your .htaccess file:
  Code below applies for redirecting individual pages. This code should be implemented for EACH page you are looking to redirect permanently
  "redirect 301 /html/oldPageName.htm
  http://www.yoururl.co.uk/newPageName.htm"
- Setting up initial canonical redirects. URL Canonicalisation is an essential part of ensuring that content duplication issues are circumvented. Simply put, canonicalisation is the process of defaulting to a particular URL when there are a number of alternatives
  For example,
  http://www.citylofts.co.uk
  http://citylofts.co.uk/
  http://citylofts.co.uk/index.html
  are technically all different URLs, but need to be treated as a single URL to avoid content duplication penalties.
  Example code that should be added to your .htaccess file (for Apache servers)
  "RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoururl\.com [NC]
  RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoururl.com/$1 [R=301,L] "
- Creating a Google XML sitemap
  Recommended site for automated XML sitemap creation:
  http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
- Ensuring that all links are static HTML links
- Improving naming conventions of pages to make for improved URL's
- Use of HTML tags that puts emphasis on targeted key phrases.
- Website coding, based on mock-up designs, geared towards providing maximum SEO benefit
- Ensuring that SEO best-practice is adhered and avoiding all intentional or unintentional "Blackhat" SEO techniques with concerns to coding, example – Hidden Text
  Example of hidden text code:
  <body bgcolor="white"><font color="white">This is an example of hidden text</font>
- Implementation of an on-site sitemap