Seo Stoopid!
By Bill Kruse, Fri Dec 23rd

Why am I SEO Stoopid?

I'm SEO Stoopid because I didn't properly take notice of what mystats could have told me.

If I would have done, I would have noticed something sooner andfactoring that something into my response would very probablyhave saved me a goodly number of lost posters and art printsales.

My site, www.kruse.co.uk/,is about SEO. I've been doing it since 1996 or thereabouts andhave clients of many years standing. Halfway through last year,I started adding posters pages to it. It's restful andunoressured compared with a lot of SEO, plus I wanted to see howfast I could get unrelated pages indexed and where and withwhom, plus unexpectedly I found that I enjoyed doing it, lots ofreasons.

When the first two phases of Jagger hit, I was cool. It washedover my seo clients the way I expected it to (it had no effectsat all), and it washed over my (by now only mostly) SEO site theway I expected it to (it had no effect at all there either).

Then came the third wave. Oh dear!

My site's serps (not my clients' - they're all fine) went into adecline that they still haven't come out of. I was getting damppostcards from my serps telling me what depth they werereaching. They told me in one message they'd dived deeper thanany known footballers. Imagine! If they ever come back upthey'll need time in a decompression chamber before they cansurface again.

I decided that since I was tanking anyway no-one would befinding my poster pages from the engines and so now was the timeto hive my poster pages off to their own site, something I'dbeen meaning to do for some time as a site is unlikely to dowell for two such diverse subjects. I got myself a new domainfor them too, www.here-be-posters.co.uk/ in anticipation of theday when I have more time and can settle them down on their owndedicated space - the demand I had for them shows that theydeserve it and I'll be attending to this in the New Year.

I put them in a little backwater personal hosting space I havewith my Broadband ISP. I have a custom 404 on my main site and Iadjusted it to make it plain to folk that I'd moved the postersto a new domain as they were swamping my SEO efforts.

Now I always kept a good eye on my stats but I'd failed to notethat results from Google, these days, aren't just from Googleany more. They're from Google Images too - and despite the factthat I'd tanked in Google.co etc for text seaarches, unknown tome as my old stats package didn't make the distinction, myposters were still very very well ranked in Google Images. Ionly found this

out by studying my Google Analytic stats, aservice I'd only recently signed up to in anticipation ofclients expecting me to keep them abreast of Search Engine andSEO events in general. Normally I leave it a while beforejumping aboard, wait till the kinks get ironed out, but with allthe publicity i didn't think I'd be afforded that privelige.

I checked out "Michael Sowa Prints". I was in the 80's inGoogle.com but to my amazement I was at positions 1 and 3 inGoogle Images. I checked out "Salvador Dali Prints" and"Escher-prints". Same kind of deal, I was well off the main mapand out in the boonies in the text-driven Googles but top 5 inGoogle Images. Go see, they'll probably still be there even now.

So, what was I to do? All those potentially hard-to-get serpswere going to waste as when people didn't see the result theyexpected when they clicked through, just my 404 page (politethough it was) they just went somewhere else.

Hurriedly put all my pages back up again is what I did, and onmy SEO site too, (www.kruse.co.uk/), thinking to catch whatbusiness I can from what's left of the Christmas rush. I've leftall of the links to the new site (www.here-be-posters.co.uk/) in place as they'll get people hopping back and forthfrom each site to the other, hopefully without realising. Allthe posters and art prints, the wall tapestries too, will haveto be moved over eventually and on a permanent basis. You canhave a site about SEO or a site that uses SEO to sell posters,you can not, not for any length of time, have just the one sitethat does both.

Not the way Google are ordering the universe anyway.

I'll change over slowly in January using individual 301redirects and this time they really will be permanent.

For now though I don't believe it'll matter as Google, accordingto their own stats via Google Sitemaps, have no info yet aboutwww.here-be-posters.co.uk/. I'll see it doesn't get indexedproperly before I've moved everything over permanently.

But look at the sales opportunity I very nearly missed, eh?

Moral of the story is, make sure your stats package is the bestthat it can be. I don't think I'll be using my old stats packagetoo much from now on, but I will keep it on as it does have someindividual visitor tracking capabilities that Google's versionof Urchin currently lacks. Always remember, reading your statsregularly will save you money and time in the long run.

But do make sure they're as detailed as possible - you may missimportant information if they aren't! Don't be an SEO Stoopid!

About the author:Bill Kruse has been doing SEO at Kruse InternetServices since 1996.