How I Became Number 1 - Obstacle 2 and 3
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Obstacle #2: Frames! I have always been aware of the old adages about frames and all of the obstacles that they come with, but I never really fully understood how it pertained to search. I can now say that I fully understand how frames relate to search. On August 1 of 2007, I implemented the aforementioned "ten-click registration" policy. As illustrated in the graph below, search engine traffic absolutely took off. In just four months, we went from 5 search engine visits a day to over a thousand!
Then December 1 hit, and our traffic and ranks began to plummet. One random day, Google just decided to index the header frame of all of my pages and not the body frame. Of course the former had just an image in it and the latter had all of the content! For about a week, if you searched "The document you have requested requires a frame-capable browser," you would get about 1,000 of my pages, as this was the only text in the entire top frame! Don't you just love how unpredictable Google can be? It took about a week to rid the site of frames, and in the same graph below, you can see how much of an effect that had!
Obstacle #3: Title Tags. I had some questions about the relation of a keyword's placement in the title tag to its search engine rank and how keywords can be diluted by the number of words in a title tag. There really wasn't much real data on the web about it so I decided to find the solution myself. I was most interested in a definitive answer about the effects of having the web site name or company title in the front of EVERY title tag on the site. Interestingly, there are hugely successful sites that do this and hugely successful sites that don't which further complicated the issue for me. For example,
Walmart.com - Bridal Jewelry Designer
Walmart.com - Music Downloads ........etc
Next: Sifting Through Keywords >>
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