I have been commissioned (I don't know why I use this word. I guess it sounds like a royal assignment ) to do the SEO/PPC work on www.epickmeup.com, a transportation service company. Client doesn't want to pay for a redesign, so I am basically wrapping wounds with better bandages, so to speak.

A brief history:
- Site had high page download time

- Headers weren't marked with in H tags but B tags

- There were no P tags. The developer used double BRs

- Title and keywords were the same for each page

- Nav bars were inconsistent across the site

- No site map

- No external CSS/JS file. Everything done either inline or on the page.

PPC solution:
In March, I registered the site with Adwords. Site traffic jumped from 87 in February to 215 in March to 712 so far in April

SEO Solution:
Still in progress. I intend to address the above in addition to:

- Coding for XHTML transitional because of all the tables

- remove html and inline styles from the tables and put them in external stylesheets.

- Validate his "reservations" page. I already did this on the back-end.

Hopefully, with PPC already in place, it is only a matter of time before he sees SEO results. The plan is get him to the top 5 ASAP. This project is due May 1st.

Obviously, there won't be much cosmetic changes. All changes will only be available via "view source".

If there is anything else you guys think I should take into consideration, do post it here. Again, remember, I am not being paid to redesign and so I will keep such changes to the barest minimum. The site only has 4 pages, so I didn't charge him much

Just thought I should share

Top 5 in which keywords

Sorry loungr,

I meant top 5 results returned from a google search, SEO-wise. This will be the result of semantic markup, rich keywords (as determined by words used in his industry), etc.

I hope this answers your question.

but top 5 in which keywords the site cant be top 5 in every imaginable keyword ist related to and whther top 5 is achievable depends on the competition for those keywords

Actually loungr,

When I said "top 5", I meant SEO-wise, not PPC-wise. For PPC, there is a lot of competition for keywords. As a matter of fact, there are some words my client is paying $10 per click for.

SEO-wise however, it all depends on link quality, keyword-density of your pages and semantic markup for your pages, among others. Besides, google doesn't even use keywords as a criteria for SEO as many pple simply view source, copy and paste from their competition.

I hope this helps.

am talking seo wise for example i run a site an african social network and in my seo i think ok what do people that want this kinda site look for so it think in terms of ok some are tech savvy others casual users and then i build a list based on that so lets say


african friends
african social network
african network etc etc
now my seo work will be to rank high when someone searches for these words not on a ppc basis but seo,
so then i begin work on it

things like keyword density though in my opinion are so web 1.0, the likes of yaho, msn and ask might still think relevant for google its more about backlinks, so more what you do outside your site than what you do in it

Not to beat on a dead horse, but again, I was paid to code for google and google doesn't place emphasis on keywords. Keyword density, sure, but not keywords, as in meta tags.

backlinks r good but rnt all in all. Take one of my personal sites, www.geocities.com/myibibio. If at all, perhaps no more than 5 links worldwide (2 of which are from 2 sites of my own ). But type in "Ibibio dictionary" (which by the way isn't part of my keywords if u view source), that site comes in #1. So it sure isn't all about backlinks. There's more:

1) semantic markup

2) keyword density

3) site map

among others.

.

As a quick update:

I finished SEOing the site last friday. As of April 24, 2007, the site came up in the top 3 search results returned for certain keywords.

Of course, since I told the client 4 - 6 months, I will keep my mouth shut for at least a month before giving him the news. That way, it looks like a miracle

It's nice to know that I am at least doing something right