For a long time we have wondered why we didn’t see much search traffic - most of our 1,000 a day visitors come via hard-links. 65% of visitors come from referring sites, 21% via direct traffic and just 14% via search engines (source: Google Analytics).
I spoke with an SEO friend (Robin), it seems we’re missing out on some really obvious points. We have a Page Rank of 6 and many hard-links so we’re doing fine from there. We’ve never used link-exchange schemes or other traffic-drivers so we have a clean history (no black-hat badness here!).
Using Google to investigate some common terms we find some disturbing results:
- “learning python” rank: not in the first 160 results
- “python tutorial” rank: 71
- “python videos” rank: 2
- “wxpython” rank: 41
- “python wing” rank: 56
- “python idle” rank: 102
- “pydev” rank: 8
- “wing ide” rank: 8
- “ipython” rank: 6
- “blender videos” rank: 23
- “blender tutorial” not in first 132 results
- “blender video tutorials” rank: 8
- “django tutorial” rank: 52
- “python(145)” rank: 6 [see below]
- “python portal” rank: 46 [see below]
- “python collection” rank: 31 [see below]
For many key phrases that describe our popular videos we rank well away from the oh-so-critical first page of Google results - sometimes so far away that I couldn’t even find a result.
Our inbound traffic shows that ‘django tutorial’ and ‘blender video tutorials’ are two of our top-four search referrers. For the last month we’ve had following inbounds from Google via these:
- “showmedo”: 549
- “django tutorial”: 139
- “show me do”: 135
- “blender video tutorial”: 65
There are some really obvious things that needed fixing. Our ‘portals’ like the Python Portal had the title “Welcome to the Python Portal” with body text “These are our resources for python. We have 37 series of which 2 are commercial in this category”.
After some simple changes we have a title of “Python Tutorial Videos” with body text “We have 38 tutorials for learning python and 2 are commercial.”. This text should reinforce the search terms that we want to score well for.
On one of the Python videos, under the video we had a list of Tags which read: “Tags: Beginners(67) Django(2) Programming(4) Python(145) WebDev(15) WebDevelopment(1)”.
There is no space between the tag and the opening bracket. Fixing that should yield a higher relevance for the pages associated with the tags: “Tags: Beginners (67) Django (2) Programming (4) Python (145) WebDev (15) WebDevelopment (1)”.
Amusingly a google for “python(145)” yields a link to one of our pages and we get useful results for “python portal” and “python collection”. I want to see these results disappear and our main search terms improve.
The third change has been the introduction of a more descriptive Title attribute for each page. Originally we had “ShowMeDo” and now we have “Learning Python, Linux, Java and Ruby with Tutorial Videos”. I plan to make this more dynamic in time.
