What They Don’t Tell You About SEO – Part 1
Jan 24 2008

Picture by Sandy Blanchardwooden-steps-hill-sblanchard.jpg 

As some of you know we signed up with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm, SpryDev, back in mid-December.  It’s been a great process and I already wish that we had our site designed with SEO in mind to being with.  We are making several design, layout, menu, text, etc. changes that are very time consuming.  I wish they could all be done overnight but given all of our time constraints unfortunately they can’t!

I think my biggest learning experience (note to self) so far is to have an SEO expert involved during the design of the site.  It apparently will save a lot of time later.  Now we won’t be sure if any of these changes will actually result in increased conversions for some time but so far they make sense to me.  Apparently seeing results overnight doesn’t happen just like we can’t make all the changes overnight.  Sigh.

The good news is in the past month we have seen a slight increase in the number of visitors.  We’ve also seen more people finding us based on organic search (i.e., search terms in Google) versus a direct landing.  Most people still find the Babble Soft site by searching on terms like Babble Soft, Baby Insights, Aruni (my name), etc. which is what I’m calling a direct landing.  Since I’m not Britney Spears or some other famous person, it doesn’t really do us much good for people to be searching on my name!  Now a noticeable few are finding us with relevant keywords.

Here are some of things we have done or are still working on:

  • Changing our menu navigation and adding cool buttons.  All in the name of increasing conversion.  Brian Massey who blogs at Customer Chaos is their conversion specialist and he’s given us some great recommendations that will hopefully pay off big time.  Interestingly, he just did a great post called Here’s the Truth About Building Your Website that is pretty accurate.

  • Creating individual landing pages for our Family Stories and Press Releases.  Check out our Sleep & Immunization Release that just went out!

  • Setting up a phone number to display on our site (should have that up soon – I need to record a great greeting message)

  • Adding Page Titles and Descriptions to each page.  I can’t believe we hadn’t done that.  DOH!!  I guess that’s why they get the big bucks and further reason why we should have involved an SEO expert during the design phase of the site.

  • Building links.

  • Submitting articles, press releases, and other stuff to all the various sites that love them as much as we do. 🙂

Rose, our project manager at SpryDev seems to be very patient since I email her night and day asking her what else we can do and how fast we can do it.  When it’s your personal credit card that gets hit each month you want to do everything possible to start seeing sales come in to offset those expenses. 

Did I know that we would have to make some changes to our site going in?  Yes, of course.  Did I realize the extent of the changes, the time it would take to make them, and that cash wouldn’t start rolling in the door 10 seconds after we made each change?  Not so much.

If you are interested in learning more about “What They Don’t Tell You About SEO,” go ahead and subscribe to this blog.  If you know more about SEO than I do (chances are you do), then leave a comment and share your wonderful wisdom with the rest of us!

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