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| Search Optimization Case Study, Planning Search Optimization, example based on work for Motodate, a Southern California Online Dating Company People new to search optimization sometimes ask me how the process works. One important step is the planning. In the last case study, I dealt with the importance of combining the target keywords with good copywriting. In this case study, I will cover planning your optimization effort. The usual situation you will face involves optimization for a site that has already been built. In the pre and post sales interview, the customer usually defines some keywords they want to target. These keyword targets are sometimes realistic, sometimes not realistic, but they are the keywords with which the customer believes he/she can achieve success. For the sake of providing an example, we will discuss More Web Leads client Motodate, a southern California based online dating company. Online dating is an attractive marketplace because it can support a fair number of competitors - any company which can get to critical mass can achieve profitability and can then take more time to attempt to tackle market share leadership. Motodate has the &lequo;unique” proposition of letting you see prospective dates in their cars and form an opinion about the “live” individual rather than the picture you find online, which may or may not be the person behind the profile. My client initially had some straightforward keywords:
I asked the client to narrow down the geography, because it is generally mu8ch easier to score keyword rank in the search engines with a product/service keyword in combination with a geography keyword, but the client insists that his service is national in scope. With a reasonable list in hand, we proceeded to the next step - search optimization planning. The Motodate site is a ColdFusion site, and the practical cosequence is that the URLs for the pages are somewhat linger than for html sites. My next step is to give each of the main pages of the site a name (these match the page's location - home, about, dashboard, etc.) and to copy the fully resolved URL to my search planning worksheet. At this point my search planning worksheet looks like this: Home: http://motodate.com/ Because the content management system (CMS)is tracking individual users, it will sometimes add user tracking to the URL. For CMSs that behave this way, it is important to read the URL, and experiment to take out the user tracking to get clean URLs for search targeting. In this example, the dashboard URL was cleaned up from this: http://motodate.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.home&CFID=1085060&CFTOKEN=57075560 to this: http://motodate.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.home - I hope that makes sense. Having the URL list handy makes writing your links - both from within the site and from other sites much easier as well. The next step is to take an inventory of the keyword targets on these existing pages - both the ones matching what the client has specified and the ones the client hasn't specified but which are already in the website's text. Continuing to use the About page as an example, the planning sheet now looks like this: about It is important to take this inventory because it is better to target for keywords occuring naturally in the client#039;s text than to modify their text - in most cases they have given considerable thought to their text and haphazard changes to inject keywords may break the logic of their copy, make it clumsy, and lead to disagreements with the client. This inventory can also allow you to identify gaps - keywords the client beleives they should target but for which they have no matching copy. With your target keyword list in hand and your file list/keyword inventory - you are now prepared to tackle the task of copywriting the titles. Remember, as we noted in the last case study, the titel is what most users will see in the search results - so good copywriting is key to getting a high clickthrough rate - but at the same time the words in the title are regarded as important indicators of what keywords are applicable, so you need to balance these two conflicting goals. With those thoughts in mind, we ended up with this plan for Motodate:
With this plan - we are ready to move to the next steps. |