Codesta recently updated its website and we wanted to share some of our experiences from the process. One of the major reasons we endeavoured to update our website was to increase the breadth of our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reach. Too often SEO is an after-thought of many projects, and this can prove costly over the short and long term. We've spoken with companies who have undertaken huge and costly website upgrades only to experience significant declines in their online traffic. What's worse, the new site is not "bad" or unfriendly, usually it's quite the opposite. They have done extensive user testing, tweaked their interface to make it that little bit better and wham. Traffic drops. Why? Most often we find it's because they had no previous understanding of their website reach. Their audience is linking to articles deep within their site, and their site visitors are from all over the place. This deep linking drives important search results relevance with Google, the major source of traffic for most websites. If a company upgrades or wholesale changes its site without understanding the impact, it's no small amount of work to fix the damage. To elaborate, I'll use our website and what we did to ensure this didn't happen to us, as an example.
Before upgrading we endeavoured to make sure we didn't "hurt" ourselves as part of the process. A major component of this was understanding how Google currently indexes our site and drives traffic to www.codesta.com. As mentioned in other articles, Codesta is an Agile driven organization, so we included a spike in our first website upgrade sprint, to understand our relationship with Google. What we found surprised us. Our oldest articles on our original website from 2002 still had valid links to it from remote destinations on the Internet. Though a little dusty, these links were still important as linking drives relevancy, and that drives search results traffic. Our first lesson... keep the old articles around.
The second learning through the spike was that Google continues to offer great tools for webmasters to understand their place in the Google Index. A quick visit to Google Webmaster Tools showed us the last time Google had visited our site, all the errors their web crawlers were finding, our index statistics, webpages with the highest Page Rank and much more. It was a full day of leveraging their Diagnostic tools and site linking reports for us to understand what we needed to do. Through everything we found on their site we were able to develop a clear plan to smoothly transition to our new website instance.
Our third learning was the value of a sitemap. Most websites maintain a sitemap somewhere on their site, but the days of end users navigating directly to it are long since over (am I dating myself?). Though sitemaps still have their place in helping with page ranking and end user navigation, they pale in comparison to the value offered by a sitemap.xml file submitted to Google. Google's Googlebot is a much happier camper when provided with an xml file it can digest. Further, the xml sitemap provides a webmaster with the opportunity to explicitly tell Google what pages are a priority to the site operators. Without these values Google assigns each page the same priority which could inadvertently direct traffic to less important areas of your site. We also found that the presence of the sitemap.xml consistently accelerated the Google verification and crawling process. If a sitemap.xml existed we always found we were visited the same day and able to make changes very quickly.
Our last key learning was from our analysis of our Google Analytics (GA) Reporting. We have been GA users for the last 2+ years and have been very happy with the information we've gathered. We've been happy to learn that our blog has been productively generating traffic since we launched it 2 years ago. We also knew that we wanted to lower our Bounce Rate to provide visitors with a better experience. One nifty new tool we were happy to play with was the Google Website Optimizer. It was a critical tool that helped us understand how people were navigating our site. It enables you to develop scenarios, called Experiments, where you can test where you place content and how users respond to it. We found one key learning from this process. We had WAY too much content on our old homepage. Visitors weren't staying to read everything we shared. The new site is borderline sparse, but we like it that way. We were pleasantly surprised to see users frequently navigating to our Contact Us page, a positive reinforcement of our call to action.
Once our Google-centric tinkering was done, we wanted to perform one last validation step. We wanted to make sure that we weren't just Google friendly, but had implemented a web friendly site for all users. There are great resources and examples on the Internet of sites that have spent considerable time and energy making sure their site works for all users. Mobile devices, the visually impaired, or individual preferences on font sizes require consideration and we wanted to make sure we were doing our best. A personal favourite of mine for benchmarking our deployment is the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (cnib.ca). A quick look at their page header reveals they've considered many aspects of their user base. From contrast levels to screen readers they need to carefully consider their users. Codesta's long term goal is to provide the same level of access to our site, and our latest site release is a first step in that direction. To meet this goal we leveraged some well known SEO testing tools to ensure we'd done our job. Some of the tools we used (and liked) include:
- Electrum's SortSite SEO Testing Tool - SortSite does an excellent job providing a robust evaluation tool which makes you want to upgrade to their full version after just one use! Their tools provide information on coding errors, accessibility issues and compatibility with major search engines. The level of detail they provide is excellent and the interface makes clicking through to detailed data very easy.
- Aaron Wall's SEOBook and SEO Toolbar for Firefox - Built right into your browser, the SEO Toolbar does a great job of providing data while you review a site.
- W3C Markup Validation Service - Not to be outdone, the W3C has provided many free tools you can use to test your site.
- SEOmoz - Lots of useful info, and plenty of data and tools to digest.
- Yahoo UI Library - Last, but definitely not least, Yahoo maintains a large UI library for developers to maintain. It's a great resource for all UI developers out there, and contains many practical tools to help develop a great, SEO friendly website.
Launch! Finally...
Away we go... We're relieved and happy with the results of our learning exercise. Much of what I've shared is very well known, documented and free on the Internet. Despite that fact, we felt we really needed to share because there are still so many people doing it wrong. We understand no one is perfect, and we really hope this article helps. With that, one last piece of advice...
Continue using the SEO tools we've described and the Google Webmaster resources to check-in on your site after launch. This is particularly true for Google immediately after launch, and roughly a week or so afterwards. In that timeframe Google will have visited your site, indexed results and started sharing that information with the world. You can consume all of this reporting via the Google Webmaster tools, and help them do a better job of promoting your website. This is your window of opportunity to "limit the damage" and catch errors before they're widely distributed across the Internet. Don't delay, and you'll save yourself one more headache.
