The Pure Power of SEO

She had hired an “SEO expert” to optimize her site. She had decent placements for her product in her area on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, but wanted to take her business to the next level.

The “expert” devised a plan that would, in her opinion, improve the rankings. The plan consisted of the following:

• Take out all meaningful content, and replace it with keyword strings. Location was emphasized in these strings. The product was only peripherally mentioned.
• Put in alt-tags with the location in every one. Each product now had nothing but a list of cities in it!
• Change the title tag, and description metatag to nothing but keyword strings.
• Put bullet points into the pages like “order info” and “company info” which had nothing but keyword strings in them.
• Create a folder for each city, and put a new site page into each folder, with the name of that city on the page and in the page filename, with no content but keyword strings.

Now, we’ve been saying that Google penalizes for keyword stuffing. This entire plan was nothing but keyword stuffing.

The lady called me on recommendation from one of her associates. She explained that her Google traffic had dropped, and the quality of customers was much poorer, and her conversion rate had dropped. The tactics used by the other person on this website hurt EVERY aspect of performance in the site.

We developed a plan to clean up the site. The first step was to remove the keyword strings from the home page, and to put in some meaningful indexable content. All location references were deleted except for a tactful mention in the title tag of the two primary locations, a proper mention of several of the locations within the description tag, and a listing of delivery locations in the menu sidebar on every page. We did that one step, then started working on global changes offline. The home page was the only thing changed initially.

Within a week, she noticed that her business was picking up. She was getting Google traffic again, and she was getting calls from the class of customers she was aiming at, instead of the lower quality customers. Site traffic is up, site conversions are up.

She is looking forward to the changes to the other pages, to see what happens when each page is properly optimized instead of being the victim of keyword stuffing. So are we - because times like this prove to us the value of what we do.