Seo credentials
The skills required to manage the SEO requirements of a website are varied. A technical element exists, ensuring the website’s mechanics are optimised is of prime importance. Ensureing the quality of content is high is another incredibly important factor.
The certificates below are a mix of technical and content related skills. SEMrush is a piece of software that can be to monitor a website and identify how it can be optimised. The SEMrush certificates do cover broader requirements, for example the technical certificate covers the skills required for technical SEO, not just the software.
My Early SEO History
I couldnt find this on waybackmachine, but my interest in SEO started in 2002. My first job in Australia was working with a recruitment company. I designed a website that showed the seek listings for jobs that were available. The recruiters worked in a niche market and I realised that if the landing page contained the names of the companies in that marketplace, it was a great way to promote the company. The technique would now be branded “black hat” but at the time was effective.
The next opportunity I had to apply some SEO techniques was with the B-Protected website. In 2003 the website was optimised with keywords onpage and in the urls. This is on wayback machine here . During my employment with B-Protected I continued to grow the website. highligths included:- (i) gaining a link from AMEX as part of a shop small promotion. (ii) gaining number 1 position for some now very popular keywords including Promotional Clothing, Safety Boots (still first page), Hard Yakka Workwear, Blundstone Boots… (iii) used sub domains to increase the specificity of sections of the site and could get free directory links for each sub-domain (iv)used link sculpting techniques to increase the value of the website pages (v) linked a crm to the website to manage nearly 12,000 products and make the site a very valuable source of information.
Organic SEO Example
While working for B-Protected I grew the traffic and in turn business generated by the website, at one point I hit over 1000 unique vistors in one day. The flow on effect at its peak was around 30 – 40 retail sales per day shipped via AAE all over Australia and 5-6 trade quotes per day with many account customers gained and some single transactions reaching $30 – 40K.
Being early to market, especially with Branded search meant that B-Protected often would outrank the manufacturers. With time, from 2013 onwards, this strategy became less effective. Local search also impacted negatively, since B-Protected only operated from one location. A content driven approach helped maintain populately in my later years of working here, producing content to target specific needs, like rail workwear for example, made up for the declining brand search positions.
seo and upgrading your website
One area that is often overlooked by many website agencies, is how SEO is affected when a new site is launched. A website that has been in place for say the last 5 years will have gained authority and links from many sources, all of these will point at the existing pages and may be matched to the content on that page.
Often, much to my annoyance, new websites are launched with a new site structure and all the old links are left to wither and die. This will often mean that in the short term, the new website does not attract as many visitors as the old one and can leave business owners perplexed that the investment they made has had a negative impact. Diverts can be put in place to make sure that if a customer clicks an old link, that it matches to the new content. This is time consuming and many website companies do not do this for that reason. Not only are customers impacted, but search engines like google measure how popular a page is by how many other pages refer to it. When you loose these links, the whole site can suffer.