Search engine optimisation, the technique to prime your website to gain as high a search engine position as possible. Some love, some hate it. Personally I am in the love it category. I have loyally followed the search engines and their ever changing algorithms and as reward for my efforts have managed to always gain a high ranking for websites I develop.
A search engine optimisation project I have had in for a while now is to improve the ranking of a Pole Dancing Lessons website Pole Central. This website has been penalised in the past for adopting scupilous seo techniques such as gateway pages and hidden text, performed by SEO consultants who clearly didn`t have a clue.
So, not an easy project. They appeared nowhere at all on search results before I tool them over and were currently on the blacklists but hey I thought, give it a go. I was only to search engine optimise the website , they like the design and wished to keep it.
Off I trotted, I had been granted full access to the raw website files so quickly changed the html, changed the image navigation to text based etc, used semantic coding, utilised title tags and all the other little SEO snippets to use, gained external links pointing to the site and resubmitted.
A week later all of the new pages within the website had been trawled and listed by Google but because of the blacklist gained several years earlier they were still nowhere in the rankings.
More external links later, changes in content to make Google think the site was a frequently updated one and still no change in the rankings. Normally by now I see a dramatic increase in the natural search engine rankings of all websites I have optimised. This was my first forray into a blacklisted website and I wasn`t enjoying it.
Seeking advice, I am lucky enough to know someone who knows someone ;o) at Google HQ. He told me the best thing to do is use the Google webmaster tools to effectively ’start again’ on the website and domain. For those of you that don`t know, Google Sitemaps is a facility whereby you tell Google about every page in your website via a simple xml file you create, it can then go ahead and crawl these pages.
I had never used these tools in a live environment as I had never needed to. A properly structured website will have no problem being trawled by Google and other engines.
So here is my situation now, I have used the Google webmaster tools and told it about all ‘dead’ pages still indexed from the old navigation (.asp?id=72637836 for example) and uploaded a sitemap. A Google official told me this was the way to go, so lets give it a go.
I will post my results right here on the www.davidfreelance.co.uk website.
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