A small search engine optimization experiment

Thursday, January 31, 2008, 12:27 PM
Website Design by John

I've been having a discussion about the merits of SEO with someone who was seeking a link on one of my websites. Now, this guy's history with websites has been nothing but carnage going back a long way. No success at all. Yet, we have a conversation that was ever slightly adversarial on the subject.

So, in the spirit of adversity, I offer this gem... Punxsutawney Hometown. Why do I offer it? To prove a a point about the value of doing your SEO right, and to do it white hat.

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The goal of this experiment is to beat his existing website in Google PageRank and search results by doing all of the search engine optimization the right friggin way.

His website -- which you can go Google "Punxsutawney Hometown" if that turns you on (sorry, but linking to him sort of defeats the control of the experiment) -- is a study in ways to not do search engine optimization.

Consider it's numerous flaws:

Poor title: one word, no descriptive.
Keyword stuffing on a redirected index page!! Holy cow! There's doing SEO wrong, and then there's that.
All main content is in Macromedia Flash. Google does not disassemble Flash and shows a particular disdain for formats other than HTML anyhow. Hell, I've had success converting PHP docs to appear as HTML docs. That tells you how snotty Google gets about formats, because there's way too much PHP-driven content out there to be too snooty about PHP. yet it is.
No real HTML content ... at all. Period. Wow.
What content there is is nested in an IFRAME on a remote server. Really.

There are more, but those are the mortal sins in the eyes of our Beloved God, Google.

So, I'm floating my experiment to show the value of white hat search engine optimization. I'm trying to help someone stubborn find the only religion there is to find on the internet: Google.

And of course the messenger of that religion, GoogleBot.

We'll see... Not that the entire lesson will have much value. The stubborn rarely learn. Especially if they work in the print industry.

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Welcome!

Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

The goal of this blog is to fill in blanks that may be empty as you get your business rolling.

This blog, particularly the source code section, is not intended for beginners. If you are not comfortable with databases, Ajax, DOM objects and other advanced methods, I strongly suggest you go take a look over at W3 Schools before even reading -- let alone tinkering with -- any of the code here.

I hope this blog has some value to web designers as they attempt to get their businesses going.

Good luck, and happy reading.

Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design