March 3, 2008
What They Don’t Tell You About SEO – Part 2
Billiard Cupcakes – Photo by PinkCakeBox (flickr)
As a follow on to my What They Don’t Tell You About SEO – Part 1 post, here goes Part 2.
So now we are about 2 ½ months and 3 ½ payments into Search Engine Optimization with SpryDev. We’ve made several changes to our site based on some great recommendations by Brian Massey at Customer Chaos and now we wait and measure the results. We have seen an increase in trial account sign ups and a few more sales, but I’m still waiting for the landslide! 
I know it is sometimes an experimental process with keyword selection, and I know since we aren’t selling cupcakes (i.e., a well understood product) that things might take a little longer. I know all of this and yet I still want (dare I say need) to see those results immediately because I’m fundraising. With every presentation I make, the more users I can tell potential investors have signed up, the more compelling the story becomes and the chances of getting funding increase ever so slightly. Sort of a + b = c stuff. Sometimes those tiny incremental changes can make all the difference.
I was reading some blogs and came across a neat tool called Website Grader that tells you how your website ranks with regards to SEO. Social Media Mom mentioned it and when I ran the tool a distant memory was triggered because I was sure I had seen reference to this site before and lo and behold Pearl at Interesting Observations had mentioned it back in October 2007! I can’t remember the score I had on my blog when I ran it then, but I ran a report for both http://www.babblesoft.com/ and http://www.entrepremusings.com/ and here are the results:
Babble Soft
Score: 67 out of 100 (a D grade – wah!)
Google PageRank: 5
Google Indexed Pages: 66
Last Google Crawl Date: February 25, 2008
Traffic Rank: Top 8.01%
Inbound Links: 2,815
I also discovered we were not yet listed in the Yahoo! Directory but that has since been corrected and now we are. We are still waiting for DMOZ and ZoomInfo to acknowledge our submissions. I know SpryDev has submitted us for many more directories. For some reason, this tool hasn’t really put the fact together that the related blog is this one. I hope at the next Google crawl date, we move out of the D range. Being the overachiever that I am, getting close to a failing grade makes me, well uh, let’s say not happy.
entrepreMusings
Score: 95 out of 100 (an A – yay!)
Google PageRank: 5
Google Indexed Pages: 334
Last Google Crawl Date: February 28, 2008
Traffic Rank: Top 4.08%
Inbound Links: 5,699
And that’s despite not being listed in Yahoo! or the other directories. I haven’t done any formal SEO on my blog (i.e., the report even tells me I don’t have page titles and descriptions) but I know the high rank is probably primarily due to the fact that I frequently update the blog making it fun and interesting for those Google spiders and my readers to reference.
So my conclusion is that even if you have hired an SEO firm, take time to check out other SEO tools out there like Website Grader. You might just find something to ask your firm about and learn something about the process along the way. Even the best of teams and people sometimes require a little oversight. If they are a good team, they won’t get defensive and they’ll work to fix it right away and make it up to you with hopefully more than yummy looking billiard cupcakes!
Stay tuned for more of my SEO journey that may involve cupcakes (or more likely other random pictures) by subscribing to my blog here! If you have an SEO experience you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to leave a delicious comment below.
