Armchair SEO Test

Grab a bowl of popcorn, have a seat in your comfiest chair and follow along at home as we do a test of some of the most commonly communicated search engine optimization methods...

Test 1. Attempt to optimize the PBA Pottery home page for the keywords "stoneware pottery"...

Goal: First-page results status on both Google and Yahoo!

Method:
1. Capture screen shots of current search results placement for searches using the keywords "stoneware pottery" within Google and Yahoo! (the home page was showing up at around 45 and 17, respectively - as of 4/12)

2. Take a quick look at the pages that currently rank near the top of the search results for "stoneware pottery" - paying attention to page title, meta data, and placement of the words "stoneware" and "pottery"

3. Alter the PBA Pottery home page:

• changed order of keywords for index.htm to start with stoneware and pottery


• altered description to start with “Stoneware Pottery” – kept original description as second sentence.


• changed first sentence to a "Heading1" style and included “stoneware” in sentence


• added an additional instance of “stoneware” within body text


• added another instance of “pottery” within body text


• changed one instance of “artist” to “potter”


• changed order of page title from “Functional & Decorative Stoneware Pottery” to “Stoneware Pottery – Functional & Decorative”

4. Eat popcorn and sit in the comfy chair until Google and Yahoo! update indexes and recache the site.

5. Coming soon... updated results

Outstanding Questions:

• How well will this update do without taking on a formal linking strategy?
• Will this blog entry actually end up appearing higher than the pbapottery home page based on the number of times the keywords "stoneware" and "pottery" appear within it?

Stay tuned and thanks for playin'. pba.