Last Updated on Tuesday, 25 November 2008 06:24
Written by Cody Snider
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
I ran an experiment with a few key areas of SEO at work early this month with impressive results in page saturation on Google (something I monitor daily so I can keep an eye on what is and is not working for our indexing).
To put a bit of background to the experiments, let me start by saying I took the SEO position at my company only a couple months ago and the last guy was a bit ‘textbook’ with his approach (very basic strategies, but we had pages indexed). The first thing I noticed when I started to dig into the status of the clients was the horrible abuse of meta and title tags. Keyword games, as we all know, are a thing of the past and the focus is really on title and description when you look at the meta block.
As for the title tags: All duplicates with EVERY keyword in them (spam, anyone). So, the first wave of changes was to add system-wide options for title tag prepending in the CMS and dynamic, relevant titles in the controller-driven pages (this is a work-in-progress).
On to the descriptions: Comma-separated chunks of keyterms (as the system fallback) and seemingly irrelevant strings the rest of the time. Ouch. These, too, have the option for an override in the CMS and many of the controllers are now building these dynamically (another work-in-progress).
The final layer for this particular experiment was the XML sitemap. I know this is a gimicky tool most of the time, but when your site has a large amount of useful content hidden inside the in-site search and few links to pre-populated searches, a sitemap becomes necessary. So, beyond the standard navigation items, the searches were added and the sitemaps submitted.
We went, network-wide, from about 77k indexed pages to 124k indexed pages…. In one week. I know this may drop back down a bit as the spiders get a longer look at things, but it’s a nice boost for such small changes. And, of course, none of these pages have even hit my radar for position monitoring (though, in some clients, we’re starting to see a small boost).
What did we (re)learn from all this? Don’t spam OR duplicate titles or descriptions in your site and add a sitemap with pre-populated searches for your in-house searching.
