It’s been only 10 days and already we can see some significant changes to our SERP’s (Search Engine Result Page). Eightdegree was ‘lost’ 2 weeks ago (google: page 22 - #7) for “web design Santa Rosa, CA” and “SEO Santa Rosa, CA”. Some minor changes got us a long way. We optimized the home page by changing the content a bit. A better implementation of the H1, H2 tags, and most important we changed the title tag.

Here are some results:

Search term: “web design Santa Rosa, CA”
Google: page 2 - #3
Yahoo!: page 1 - #4
Live Search: page 1 - #9
Ask.com: not listed on the first 10 pages

Search term: “webdesign Santa Rosa, CA” (mind the misspelling)
Google: page 1 - #6
Yahoo!: page 1 - #2
Live Search: page 1 - #9
Ask.com: page 1 - #1

Search term: “SEO Santa Rosa Ca”
Google: page 1 - #1
Yahoo!: page 1 - #1
Live Search: page 1 - #1
Ask.com: not listed on the first 10 pages

As you can see some pretty amazing improvement for eightdegree within two weeks.

What better of a showcase then your own website! I finally have some time to optimize eightdegree.com for the search engines. As of today my website can’t be found and I’m one of the thousands web designers here in the Sonoma county area. I’m pretty successful getting clients ‘up’ in the Search Engines and now I’m using eightdegree as a showcase to what is possible.

Like I said eightdegree (ED) can’t be found. Search terms like: “web design, Santa Rosa CA” comes up with zilch for ED. We are going to change this! The next coming weeks I will keep you informed about the status of this project. Expect stats, graphs and how I managed to get a higher ranking.

This week I will focus on the on-page optimization: On-Page factors are related directly to the content and structure of the website. This normally consists of pages written in the HyperText Markup Language but also applies to other document formats that are indexed by search engines, for example Microsoft Word or PDF formats. On-page optimization involves modifying keyword frequency in the URL, Title, Headings, Hypertext Links and Body text. It may also involve reducing redundant HTML codes (aka cruft) produced by Web page authoring tools and restructuring the site to produce better linked and focussed page content.

I’ll keep you posted!