Adventures in Search Engine Optimization – Part 2

Ok, it’s been about two weeks, and the first round of optimizations is complete. It took a little longer than hoped to get the changes rolling, but now after a week, we’ve improved to a “B-” up from an “F” in the SEOMoz “Term Target” tool for dental office design! That’s a huge improvement! (To get any higher will require a pretty major overhaul.) The other two categories we are using as our yardstick for this test, the Rank Checker and Pagestrength tools, are still about the same. For round two, we will go after those by spreading the word about the site.

Adventures in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Part 1

Ok, so I’ve been working on internal web-based applications for the better part of a decade now, so I really haven’t had the need to optimize a site for search engine placement. The whole “science” of search engine optimization (SEO) has always intrigued me though. I’ve tried to stay current on the latest tricks and tips regarding SEO by flipping through books and reading SEO blogs, but until now, I haven’t delved into optimizing one for myself. That’s all about to change! Recently, I was approached and asked if I could help a new site get better rankings.

The site is for a fledgling design and architecture firm called the Enviromed Group (http://www.enviromedgroup.com.) The Enviromed group specializes in dental office design and medical office design. They have a very nice site that was put together by one of their team. It is well organized and has a nice layout. It has clear, easy to use navigation and gives the user a great sense of who they are and what they can provide. However, it has one big problem! It’s been “live” for about a month now and unless you search for the exact URL or company name, you can’t find it!

I have my work cut out for me! This will be my little SEO pet project; my test bed. The ultimate metric I will use to gauge my effectiveness will the be the page rank on Google, but to chart my progress along the way, I’m going to use some of the tools available from Seomoz.org. Here are the baseline stats from Seomoz for the Enviromed site:

Term Target F!! – Zeros straight across the board for the keywords “dental office design!” (Term Target ranks how well your site targets the desired keywords.)

Rank Checker Not in the top 100! (results) Yeahhh, ouch.

Page Strength 1.5 out of ten.

I’ve submitted a list of suggestions to the site’s designer and they will be implementing the changes over the next few days. I’ll share the progress with you here. Wish us luck!