Final SEO Report

by Samantha Bridgehouse

Problem Description

The problem that needed to be solved with this project was simple: to increase the amount of user traffic visiting the Interactive Design Lab North website. Our group was given a blank website domain where we had to build and maintain a website about the Interactive Design Program. The goal was to generate as much traffic to the website as possible by using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Google Analytics was used in order to measure the number of site visitors as well as other site statistics.

SEO/Analytics Strategies and Tactics

Keywords

One of the most involved strategies our group utilized in our SEO was the use of keywords. We aimed to get a keyword density of 2% with keywords related to interactive design, so that the Interactive Design Lab North website would have a higher search engine ranking when those keywords were searched. In order to use as many appropriate keywords as possible without keyword stuffing (spamming), we created over a dozen different pages on the site that offer information about the Interactive Design Program and Capilano University. By creating so many pages, we were able to include a large amount of written content, where we could pack in quite a few keywords without affecting the readability of the writing. Besides the written content, we also added keywords to the Meta and Title HTML tags of the site, as well as to all of the page headers. Our group tried to add images to the pages wherever possible, which allowed us to add additional keywords in the Title attribute of all of the image tags.

Content Freshness

Since websites that are updated frequently have a higher search engine ranking, our group decided to create a blog on the homepage of the Interactive Design Lab North website. By creating new blog posts every day, we ensured that our website maintained freshness. Each group member was assigned a specific day of the week in which they had to write a new blog post. We blogged about topics related to interactive design, offering tutorials and resources, as well as general technology issues and current events. We hoped to build up a number of loyal repeat visitors who would come each day to read the new blog posts.

Link Building and Social Media

Another method our group used in our SEO was link building. Websites that have lots of outgoing and incoming links are considered more popular by search engines and are given a higher ranking. All of our pages and blog posts link to other pages and blog posts on the site, which encourages visitors to explore the site further. This improved our Bounce Rate – the percentage of visitors who leave the site on the same page they entered. We also created many links to other websites wherever possible. One of our strategies for building incoming links to the site was to sign up for Social Media websites, where we were able to advertise and link to the Interactive Design Lab North site. Social Media websites also allowed us to try and create a dialogue about our site among different communities, to spread awareness of the website. We took advantage of the major Social Media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, but we also created accounts with Youtube, DeviantArt, Flickr, Screenshots, and Digg. On Facebook, we created a group for the Interactive Design Lab North website and invited our friends to join it. On Twitter, we frequently made web design and development related Tweets, linking to both our website and other useful websites. We Followed a large number of Twitter users who are a part of the web community in order to gain more Followers of our Twitter feed. On DeviantArt and ScreenShots, we uploaded screenshots of some of our web design work, and on Flickr and Youtube we uploaded photos and videos of the Interactive Design lab and numerous Rich Media projects we had completed. We added all of our blog posts to Digg and encouraged people to also Digg our posts to increase their popularity.

Contest

One of our most unique strategies to build traffic to the Interactive Design Lab North website was to host a Trivia Challenge contest. Over a period of seven days, we posted a new general trivia question each day, and asked users to email their answers to us. Of the people who answered all of the questions correctly, we did a random draw for one winner, who received a $25 giftcard to a store of their choice. This was one of our most effective strategies in increasing visitors to the site. We created a Facebook event for the contest and invited everyone we knew to join in, and we also made several Tweets about the contest on Twitter.

Outcomes

Our group was quite successful in our SEO tactics. In a two-month period, we had 421 unique visitors and 1,595 unique pageviews. On average, users were visiting 4-5 pages of our site each time they visited, and we had a respectably low Bounce Rate of 58%. Most of our website traffic came from referring sites at 58%, with only 5.5% of visitors being directed to our website from search engines. This is a number we may want to work to improve in the future, since a higher percentage of visitors from search engines would be preferred. Overall, the project had a positive outcome.

Lessons Learned

I started out this project with almost no knowledge about SEO, and after completing it, I feel like I have learned a huge amount. One of the tactics I learned, which I would want to implement in the future, is to put a greater importance on quality of visitors rather than quantity. This is important for the Interactive Design Lab North website specifically since the people who would be interested in visiting our website were mostly limited to those in the web or technology community. We tried to add content to our site that would interest the general public as well, but for the most part, people in the web industry are those we wanted to attract to the site. Although we were getting a decent amount of new visitors each day, we did not have a comparatively large number of loyal repeat visitors. We could have gained more repeat visitors by putting more focus on writing insightful and useful blog posts. Many of our blog posts simply paraphrased and linked to other author’s articles, which did not give users enough of a reason to continue visiting our blog on a regular basis. We should have written more of our own articles in order to make our site a dependable and valuable resource for the web community. Part of this limitation was due to time constraints, since everyone in our group also had other important and time-consuming projects going on and did not always have time to write a long blog post. Besides the constraints with our blog, most of the other strategies my group learned and implemented were very effective – using keywords and creating a blog to keep our content fresh for a higher search engine ranking; link building and utilizing Social Media to spread awareness of the site; and hosting a contest to entice more visitors to come to our website. This project has greatly improved my abilities with SEO, and I look forward to applying what I have learned to future projects.

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