9xb - Creating Online Success

POLARIS WORLD - A WEEK IN SEARCH!

Reoptimising a website around a new set of keywords can really illustrate how fast the search engines are able (or at least willing!) to make a decision about how your site ranks. In the course of a week, we've destroyed and rebuilt the rankings for one of our customers - without so much as linkbuilding strategy.

Our client sells Polaris World golf properties - high end residential apartments built around Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses in Murcia, Spain. By happy accident, the site was extremely well built and optimised for the search term 'polaris golf property.'

Unfortunately, Polaris World themselves run an enormous and expensive TV advertising campaign that presses home their brand name with great results. Recent studies have shown that Polaris World has a brand recall of 53% - which is exceptional for a crowded marketplace.

So the site was optimised for a tangential - but not exact - set of search phrases. For the people seriously interested in buying this kind of property the brand recall is crucial. This meant some pretty severe revision of the site coding. It's still early days, but we thought we'd let you in on a week in search.

The 1st Friday... the big bang!

One Friday morning, we uploaded the site with its all new page titles, extra content pages and sundry other tweaks to the site. The game was afoot...

Saturday/Sunday

The 9xb team attended to their various wholesome personal passions which most certainly did not include drinking and/or eating like pigs. No way.

Monday

On Monday, when we ran the ranking reports, we discovered that the rankings had plummeted across all of the search engines. The search engines had taken a look and decided that they didn't like what they saw. Only plodding old MSN kept the rankings pretty much as they were. As ever though, we had to stick it out.

Tuesday

Frankly, we daren't look.

Wednesday

Aha! The site had begun to claw back some of its previous rankings. We were very careful to make sure that the content that ranked well for the old keywords were still there, but the re-ordering had thrown the engines out for a while. Now they'd had a look around, they'd decided that things weren't so heinous after all.

Thursday

Breakthrough! The #1 spot regained on a couple of the engines for the old phrases. And what was this? The site was beginning to appear in the lower reaches for the really key terms. OK, so not dominating the rankings (yet!) but definite progress...

...and back to Friday

Todays' rankings are vindication of what onsite optimisation can achieve. The ratings from a week ago have suffered minor impact from the re-engineering of the site, but for the 'money terms' on which we're building the future of the site there is definite progress. Now that these changes have bedded in, and we know they're working, we'll be working on a linking strategy to make the most of a well-optimised presence.

Today's Moral

The search engines are more on the ball than you think. They can respond within hours to changes you make to your site. If you are thinking of changing things on your site, make sure you're thinking with SEO in mind. A little change can make a big difference - and not always for the bettter.

Notes and Queries...

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