hey it's only the twitter bragging that's funny. I believe the day will come when you will look back and wince at that and am just trying to save you the future embarassment ;)

and I think you'd agree we did have a valid point that may have already saved you some "attention" that you removed on pointing out?

re traffic and "seo converting phrases" i'll let you in on a secret, 60% ish of our serious enquiries through the site have been based around "seo packages" and variations.

"SEO" itself just raises your spam levels and link requests.

I suppose the crux of this is that you dont really understand why you are, or do you?

you're #1 because you basically aimed your whole site at it, and nobody else has optimised for it. it's a longtail, 5 hits a year term, and non-scalable if its your index page.

it's like this search, it's a crossover term hadnt even thought about that I just found while flicking around looking for examples superior business design service

if someone wants that, it's entirely possible to come take it away, and it's not an achievement. SEO at any greater than entry level is against people who are trying.

and you still definitely need to remove this from your examples of ranking prowess

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

click this to see why this is not a result to be bragging about ;)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

you know SEO has a bad enough name anyway, and youre openly admitting you're brand new here, yet selling SEO services and touting yourself as an expert on twitter?

dude good luck and all that, everyone has to start somewhere, but I just cant help feeling your strategy for longetivity is flawed.

your credibility will be shot long before you ever get ranking high enough to earn any money from it, and credibility is worth far more than most websites.

in your early days you should focus on one or two really good reference sites, even if you do them for nothing just for the exposure, and referrals from happy customers. more than 80% of our work to date has come that route and credibility is all important there.

without blowing our own trumpet too much.. (because that's a bit distasteful ;) ) I would say the seo design principles we've followed from the beginning have enabled the kind of crossover performance shown below at this later date.

but it was the title changes you prompted that actually caused them though

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...G=Search&meta=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

notice the lack of "SEO" there? (kind of ironic huh? :) )

so bearing in mind our site is only one year ahead of you in age, do you think your design will be as broadly spread across the serp as we are in 12 months time?

this is what our site was doing at the 7 months stage http://www.seoibiza.com/blog/2008/06...design-update/

do you think yours is comparable?

as if by magic (woopra) this morning this search

http://www.google.com/search?q=busin...0&hl=en&num=10

lead to a phone enquiry, we're in discussion with them.

I guess the rhetorical questions are out of order here?
 

LOL,

thanks again guys.

I'll tone it down a bit... already have a few sites doing well for the clients, so I'm all right there.

Thanks again for all the suggestions.

With much appreciation.

TN

Exactly, couldn't of said it better myself. I'm a firm believer in launching the thing as a fully optimized website from day one. People go on about things like the sandbox, new sites cannot perform etc but typically the reason is the SEO is half baked.

The king with Google is inbound links and anchor text, the Google algo is heavily link biased because they can compute and score links however them understanding and scoring content is a fair way off. You can rank a page with no content but it's damn hard to rank a page with no links. A good example is the term "Click Here" and you will see Adobe even has sitelinks for the term but it appears nowhere on the page.

Content is queen, it pulls links so yes the pair work together.

That's exactly right. At the end of the day, the only thing that counts is results. It doesn't matter what the keyword/phrase or competition, if it pulls traffic that engage in a positive action (Sale, Signup, Member, RSS Subscriber etc) you are almost at the finish line. The other part is cost per acquisition, if it costs $1 per converting visitor to obtain but you gain $2 per converting visitor it's a done deal.

I decided one day to rank here in #4, above the people in the industry i look up to and 3 months later i did. It may seem like an excellent result, but it wasn't because the converting traffic sucked and the cost/effort to maintain it wasn't justified so i dropped the term.

If you're ranking for 5 word long tails which cost peanuts to acquire, and it's bringing conversions you are doing the right thing. ;)

Thanks for joining, and welcome to the forum. :)

PS Amigo, did you notice the strange toolbar export today? For instance the first page of this thread is PR5, Google has been really buggy lately.

I noticed last night that an 11 day old blog post had gone PR2. internals only that I can see, no domain changes whatsoever.

(apart from DP :) )

ps. lol @ PR5, if that's real I may end up regretting starting this thread :)

I still think we need to define "content"

are we talking about just the onpage body text? as you said you can rank a page with no content of this type, or you can rank a page even better with a highly optimized "seo html framework" ie site structure, correct link weightings, pagetitles etc and virtually no onpage content.

we've been experimenting with this at length the last year or so here

in conclusion it seemed that the richer the onpage content, the more stable the rankings, but it didnt seem to make very much difference with how high it up would go.

so my point is how do you separate structure from content, when in fact the onpage content is more or less interchangeable when the page framework is right?

"content is king" is inaccurate IMO. from a rankings POV "SEO content is king" ;)
http://www.optimize-my-ass.com/wp-co...ng-content.jpg

Back to the Topic..
 

Ok so back on track. so the likely list of site desirable traits we have so far fora superior seo web design project is:

1. keyword research at concept stage
2. domain name choice, / directory / filenames (stemming & theming)
3. correct site structure / architecture / scalability
4. correct link weighting nav and content
5. small file sizes HTML & images
6. fast loading (speed does matter)

when this is all in place, then you think about killer king content and the standard onpage stuff.

what have I missed?

It's real, however if Pagerank = Rank then you would regret it. Pretty funny though that this thread you started buried deep in the site has a higher PR than DP's homepage.;)

That pretty much sums it up. Also on the small file sizes, you could extend the HTML & Images to all scripts like minified/compressed CSS and Javascript and also limit the usage of non-friendly scripting/ajax/flash.

Also i guess we could add clean semantic and minimal markup, using things like ALT for images, meaningful class names, simple <li> based menus and keeping content and presentation separate. At the moment (according to Matt) Google doesn't care if you use tables or pretty CSS but Google has made it known they are moving towards microformats, rich snippets and structure to understand the web rather than just index/retrieve it.

I guess there's a lot of other things, but they all melt in to the core list you mentioned.

Oh yeah, i just made some changes to the forum based on Matt's change of Nofollow information. Nothing like using your own site as a testbed, actually i have several others running but getting data from this site is easier due to a bit more authority flowing around.

Have you done any testing on the Nofollow/Evaporation claims? If so any results yet?