20/04/2017 I'm on page 2!

Final check

Can't believe I made page 2. Perhaps all the effort paid off. 

I'm still number 1 when I target 'Creative Multimedia Programming Github'. 

Webmaster results: 22 clicks in total.

Analytics: 30 sessions on April 13. It has levelled off a but since then. 2 sessions yesterday April 19.

Audience are English speakers from mostly from Ireland and United States.

 

Cities. Mostly from my hometown of Shannon County Clare.

Dropped in rankings to page 5 19/04

I checked my ranking in incognito on Friday 15/04 in the afternoon and I was on page 2....later that day I checked again and I was on page 4.

I checked yesterday and I was on page 4. Today I am on page 5. Since I added extra keywords down at the bottom of my site, it seems to be erratic rankings.








I clicked into the full Analytics report and there is a lot more information there:

I had 38 sessions.

A session is a group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple screen or page views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions. 

39.47% were new sessions.

15 new users. 

Bounce rate is 42.11%. 

Bounce rate is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave ("bounce") rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site.

Average session duration is 2.21 seconds. 

Pinterest and new repository name 14/03/2017

I created a pin on Pinterest and pinned my website to it. Hopefully this will make a difference as I seem to have dropped ranking to page 4....this could be due to all the keywords I added today....the search engines could be reading these as spam/black hat SEO.




I finally did it. I finally changed the name of my GitHub repository. This is my final attempt to gain a higher ranking for now. Hopefully this will make a difference. My new github repository is:

https://k00223369.github.io/CreativeMultimediaProgramming/




I now need to change the name back to SEO....I can't find new name repository anywhere on rankings.

It's now back to https://k00223369.github.io/SEO/

13/04/2017

An interesting thing I read yesterday on https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo was that the changes in SEO ranking may take days or even weeks to show up in ranking results. This was important because I really need to be doing all of the work now to reap the rewards by deadline day.

I checked my ranking again today. Still on page 3.

Webmaster results 13/04/2017:



Analytics results 13/04/2017:




Reading through https://www.tutorialspoint.com/seo/seo-tactics-methods.htm and find the Black Hat SEO interesting. Search engines are now advanced enough to spot Black Hat SEO.

"Always stay away from any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above properties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything." 

Also:

"No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers, etc.) unless absolutely necessary."

I also thought this was interesting:

"In general though, repeat your keyword in the document as many times as you can get away with, and up to 3-7 times in your list of metatags." 


http://backlinko.com/seo-techniques also had some interesting tips. Like the one where you use dead links in Wikipedia to link to your site. I personally don't want to do this for my site but it is a good tip for a business.

I also thought about setting up a Facebook business page and using the admin features to follow the progress and activity on my website but that is not in line with the brief we were given for this project so I will leave that out.

https://www.shoutmeloud.com/on-page-seo.html writes that 'content is king' and 'You should keep the keyword density around 1.5% percent with a mix of LSI keywords.' 

 The LSI Graph/Keyword Generator is an interesting tool. I entered the words 'Creative Multimedia Programming' in and it came back with many results. I will try and incorporate more of these words into my site.



I added a whole new panel to incorporate as many LSI keywords as possible. I also put the word 'programming' through the generator as I found out that this word holds the most weight when it comes to clicks. I will push new changes up to GitHub now.

Different browsers

I searched Google 'Creative Multimedia Programming' in Safari, Incognito, Firefox and Chrome. The results don't differ too much between browsers. I am on page three still in all browsers.


Reading through https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

finding it interesting that we should use hyphens to separate words in a url:

"Use hyphens to separate words Not all web applications accurately interpret separators like underscores (_), plus signs (+), or spaces (%20), so instead use the hyphen character (-) to separate words in a URL, as in the "googlefresh-factor" URL example above."

Also learning that using absolute links is useful to combat scrapers.

I also learned that Key Performance Indicators are important.

Webmaster tools 12/04/2017

Google Analytics



Crawl Errors Report

No crawl errors


Manual Penalty Review

No manual webspam actions found





Algorithm Updates

If used the Panguin Tool to check traffic levels against known algorithmic updates.



Site Speed and Performance

I tested it out on GTMetrix.com. These are the results: 

Still working through Bruce Clay's checklist 12/04/2016

Text Navigation

There is text navigation. I am not using any Javascript or Flash in my site. 

Sitemaps

We added the XML sitemap in class.

I have added a new HTML sitemap now also:

Robots.txt

I just added a robots.txt file to my local root folder.


Keyword Strategy and Research

The keywords I am targeting for this project are 'Creative Multimedia Programming.'

I used Bruce Clay's version of SEOToolSet Keyword Suggestion Tool. These were the results. It looks like the word 'Programming' has the highest click-through-rate.

Linking Strategy

I have tried to keep links as natural as possible and not link to anything unnecessary.

I linked all the links in my sitemap correctly now. I'm not trying to cram my site full of any unnecessary links.  

Server Configuration

I used Bruce Clay's free 'Check Server Page Tool' and all seems to be ok with it.




Static URLs

Bruce says "Complex, dynamic URLs could be a problem. If your URLs have more than two query string parameters and/or dynamic pages aren’t getting indexed and/or you have a lot of duplicate content, consider converting them to static URLs."

I don't have any duplicate content in my site. It is original content for the most part with links to related external resources. 

Static Content on Home Page

All of the content on the home page will stay the same. I will not be updating it in any way. 

No SPAM Tactics

I have read over below guidelines and I believe that my website is in line with these: Google Webmaster Guidelines, Bing Webmaster Guidelines and Google accepts for SEO.







Duplicate Content

I did a search in CopyScape.com and no results were found. Therefor I believe that I do not have duplicate content. 

New navigation screenshots 12/04/2017

Ranking

After adding all my new social media tags to my site and pushing changes up to GitHub. I decided it was time to check on my ranking......I am still number on the third page as seen below here when I google 'Creative Multimedia Programming' but I believe I have jumped up a couple of places.


When I google 'Github Creative Multimedia Programming' I am still number 1.



Url Optimization: According to Bruce Clay:

"You also want URLs to be descriptive and contain keywords, without being spammy. And shorter URLs are preferable to long URLs."

It's too late to change it now but if I were doing my site again I would have included the keywords in the name. I might look into changing it towards the end of the assignment. I feel that 'Creative Multimedia Programming' is quite a long name and I am still pushing lots of changes up to GitHub.

Bruce also says "Rather than relative URLs, use fully qualified links (http://www.domain.com). The sitemap should always have fully qualified URLs." This is new to me so I will change all the internal links in my site now to be fully qualified.

Content Freshness
I am constantly updating the content on my site at the moment.

Make JavaScript and CSS External
Both of these are external files. I don't have any Javascript at the moment but my CSS is external.

Sitewide Optimization

According to Bruce: "A site as a whole should signal expertise, authority and trust  (E-A-T) while conveying subject relevance and optimizing for search engine accessibility. The following items address this."

Contact Information

I have added contact information - phone number and email address for myself and L.I.T.

Testimonials
I just added a link to some testimonials related to the course I found online. This is quite a high ranking site in itself so hopefully this will bolster my ranking.

http://garryowenrugby.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/HDip-in-Creative-Multimedia-Testimonial.pdf


I also moved the nav bar to the top on both pages. I feel that it looks better. I don't know if I should add a sitemap as my site isn't very big.

Privacy Statement

I won't be using a privacy statement as I am not taking any information from the users.

Social meta tags

Changing my title back to just 'Creative Multimedia Programming' as I was having better results with that before I repeated the title three times. In hindsight this was a bad idea as it could be perceived as spam.
Have added twitter card meta links and new image to my site also. Successfully validated and tweeted it out.




Pinterest rich pins has been validated:


I followed David Walsh's blog to add Facebook open graph tags.

Analytics 11/04/2017 - someone from Gabon has looked at my site

Bruce Clay

I will continue working my way through Bruce Clay's tips for SEO. I will add about and contact links to my web page to improve structured data markup.
I have now added a 'contact' page and linked to L.I.T news site also through the navbar/sitemap at bottom of my page. I felt I only needed one of these as the site isn't very big. I guess I could put this at top of page also....I tried this but it doesn't look right. If people are going to see these pages it is important to me that they look good.




Uploaded the changes to GitHub and am making a few cosmetic changes also to improve the look of the site.

Social markup according to Bruce Clay refers to the code used to enhance content on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. There are six types of Rich Pins: app, movie, recipe, article, product and place. I have already linked to my site via all my social media sites. I created an article in LinkedIn and this is the highest ranking of all. I will adda Twitter card now. 

Instagram and Behance

I added links to my site on Thursday night to Instagram and Behance. I made my Instagram account public also so that it might have a higher click through rate. I checked the ranking today. I'm currently at the top when I google 'Creative Multimedia Programming Github' but I'm on the bottom of the third page when I google 'Creative Multimedia Programming'. I'm not sure why I've dropped as I was in the middle of the third page.

Ranking dropped

I made changes to improve SEO but my ranking seems to have dropped now....

It has stayed the same when I google 'Creative Multimedia Programming' but when I google 'Creative Multimedia Programming GitHub' it has dropped from number 1 to number 4 now.....

On-page optimization

Head section order:

In general, title tags should be about nine words. 

I changed the title of my site to 'Creative Multimedia Programming' repeated 3 times so that it is nine words and hopefully this will improve ranking.

I added keywords and description tags also:

<meta name="description" content="Creative Multimedia Programming">

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript, Creative Multimedia Programming">

I then ordered the keywords from longest top shortest:

<meta name="keywords" content="Creative Multimedia Programming, JavaScript, HTML,CSS,XML">


Heading tags:

I have h1 tags and h2 tags in the correct order but I also have a 'h7' tag in the middle. I will rectify this now and hopefully that will improve SEO. 
I have now changed 'h7' to 'h3'. 

Word count:

The first page on the search engine when I target 'Creative Multimedia Programming' is the L.I.T website:

http://www.lit.ie/Courses/Springboard/7061.aspx

I put it through https://wordcounter.net/

and it has 388 words. 

I have 472 words on mine. 

According to Bruce Clay 'informational web pages almost always warrant a minimum of 450 words.' 

I was going to add more content but I think now that I have enough and will concentrate on making small amendments to structure to improve ranking.

Call to action:

I only have one call to action on my page. It is to 'read more about the requirements for the course'.... I will highlight that more now by creating a border around the button, it's a 2px solid black border. 







Image and Video Optimization:

I am unsure if I should add videos to my site. Images and videos can slow down the load of a page. I have plenty of images which I am happy with but if I do add a video there is a danger that it could affect the site. I don't want to ruin the look of the site either.

Structured Data Markup: 

I will add a location and phone number to improve this. I have added a dummy sitemap down the bottom of the page for now.