leecoursey.net Dev Blog » SEO

Traffic Goals: RDL-USA.com

Lee Coursey — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:36:59 +0000

I just wanted to give an update on the website traffic goals that I had for the RDL-USA.com domain. In March, my goal was for 200 visitors. We made it to 218. In April, my goal was for 300…. and we made it 343! I am very excited about 1) a 50% increase in traffic 2) being successful at traffic goals.

This month the focus will be on higher conversion rates with less traffic and expense from AdWords. We dropped our two highest traffic keywords due to CPC being high, and conversion being low.

I have to brag.

Lee Coursey — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:01:57 +0000

I’ve been working with the new site over at RDL-USA.com very hard. I mean, it is my job so I guess that’s a good thing. If you don’t know, RDL is the family business, and it’s my day job. We’re a Dental Lab (we make dentures, partials, crowns, implant restorations) and we’re in the process of going national in a certain segment of the business.

What I’m proud of (Month over Month, Feb. over Jan.)

Visits up 62%
Unique Visits up 35%
Pageviews up 102%
Average Pageviews up 25%
Time on Site up 144%
Bounce Rate down 29%
New Visits down 17% (Google thinks bad, I think OK in this instance – we were at 75% -ish)

This is no traffic spike either. It’s the result of focused determination. It’s a progressive upswing in traffic. I can’t wait to have figures to go Quarter over Quarter.
Just had to brag for a minute. We also increased out page rank in several key phrases and keywords (key keywords?). We’re on the first page on 2 of the 3 key phrases we’re banking on.

Testing Drupal

Lee Coursey — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:54:54 +0000

I’m going with my first install of Drupal over at V5WebMarketing.com because it comes so highly recommended from SEOBook.com and I just need to know how to use it.

First impression: it’s a hell of a lot easier to use than Joomla, but I don’t know if it has the depth yet. I just haven’t tested it enough to find out yet.

The New Hotness in Domains: The del.icio.us effect

Lee Coursey — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:49:36 +0000

I have a theory. I read on GoDaddy.com yesterday that the new domain extension for the country of Montenegro will be “.me”

I’ve already been playing with some available .de domains. I thought about the .us domain, but a quick Google search told me that someone beat me to the punch. Search for “Words that end us” and see if you can find any of those words as domains.

What am I talking about? del.icio.us has started something in the collective consciousness of internet users – you don’t HAVE to have a very distinct extension to have a memorable domain name. .me and .de (and others) will provide ample oppurtunity to get awesome, memorable, and hopefully top-level domains. All we have to do is get Google and Yahoo! to ignore periods in domains. (maybe they already do?)

Joomla SEO Basics

Lee Coursey — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 03:42:36 +0000

I have been doing quite a bit of experimenting as of late for some very specific keywords, and I’ve been having some success. Because of that, and because I haven’t blogged in forever, I thought I would share some Joomla specific routes to better organic ranking.

Use JoomlaSEF from Artio: Before we go any farther, I need to let you know right now if you didn’t know, that Artio embeds some advertising for certain people in the Meta Generator tag on your site. This is why they give it for free. you can hack it, but it ain’t simple. The string is not stored locally, and I have yet to find the call in the sef.php file. Other than that: install it first, keep it updated, and make sure it’s working.
Fill Out All The Meta Tags: Listen to me very carefully: no matter your SEO buddy tells you about how important H1 tags are, don’t forget that a page with pertinent meta keywords and descriptions is still going to rank better than one without it. Fill out the article or content specific tags EVERY TIME ON EVERY ARICLE
Repeat the Keywords: If you’re writing an article about “baby dolls” then you need to mention “baby dolls” more than once in the piece.
Use Keywords in the IMG descriptions: Make sure that when you add a picture to a page that it has a description involving the primary focus of the page.
Turn Off Page Titles & Use < H1 > Tags: …and don’t be afraid of using real h2 and h3 tags for heading and subheadings.

Those are the bare minimum. For more on Search Engine Optimization for Joomla please see SEOmoz