Lies, Damn Lies and SEO
Yesterday I noticed Calthorpe Park School ranks #1 for "calthorpe" on Google. The old site was barely on the first page. The new site started at #5 in March 2006. It has gradually crept up a place at a time since then.
Things the site does not have or do:
- No link farms or fake blogs.
- No spambots registering accounts on accessibility forums. (!)
- No spambots creating inbound links from people's blogs.
- No keyword stuffing.
- No fake updates to make the site seem more active than it is.
- No www. in the URIs.
- No .com or .gov TLD.
- Domain name is not an exact match for search term (we've got "park" in it).
- Not using <h1> for main content heading.
- The <title> very rarely starts with the keyword "calthorpe".
- Navigation (Site Menu) appears before main content.
- Secondary content (Site Features/sectional navigation) appears before main content.
- No machine-readable URI catalogue (such as an XML Google Sitemap).
- No participation in Google Analytics.
- No use of Google Free Search. (I'll probably change this because result relevance in Live Search is crap.)
- Not submitted to a search engine.
- Has hardly any inbound links.
- Has no user-generated content.
- Does not use XHTML.
- Has no sitemap.xml file or other "machine-readable" index.
- Uses lightweight, meaningful markup which mostly conforms to specification. (HTML 4.01 Strict sent as text/html, natch.)
- Uses consistent source order and layout.
- Uses CSS for presentation which mostly conforms to specification.
- User-friendly URIs (except for the .htm file extension which is required by higher-ups).
- Development is prioritised thusly:
- Users.
- Web browsers and ATs, with no specific consideration to search engines.
- Authoring tools (we can't afford a superfly CMS).
- Authors (me).
- Visual design (we can't afford a designer, although I'd like one).
- Users.
- Minor adjustments to facilitate human access (taking extra care with link text, supplying brief alt text, you know the drill).
Doing user-focussed website development gets you better SEO than doing SEO.
Oh yeah, you already knew that.
Last edited by Ben Millard on 02 Nov 2009 08:17 pm; edited 4 times in total
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*cough* first link I tried was to http://calthorpepark.hants.sch.uk/admissions/why-choose-calthorpe.htm which gave a couple of redirects ending on a "404" page being served with a 200 OK code!
(But apart from that nice job
)
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Thanks for reporting it. Weird. Requests to any URI starting http://calthorpepark.hants.sch.uk/admissions/ are ending up at Hampshire's site, who kindly provide our hosting. Ran some tests in htaccess and the problem isn't coming from us, AFAICT.
I'll give them a prod about it on Friday. If it does turn out to be my fault, I'll be reaching for the :oops: smilie!
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we call it 'natural' seo...http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1995/Ukpga_19950050_en_8.htm#mdiv57
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Ben, I second all of that. It's good to see the 'theory' backed by hard results and a demonstration of what's necessary and what's not.
After reading your post I tried the same thing on our site at Great Sampford and we're also in the top spot. Our approach has been very similar to yours... who knows, it might catch on!
And before kiwibrit tells me again, I know it doesn't validate
Graeme.
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Yeah, good basics lead to good search engine success. As I'm fond of telling people, it all interlinks, like some kind of ... web.
That said, your own name is pretty easy to appear for. It takes a little more work to turn up for targeted keywords, but if you've got an accessible site a lot of the core stuff is pre-done (good link text, light pages and so on).
Matt Machell
Web Design and Development Blog
Member of the Multipack
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Meerkat, I always wondered why that site was so good. Now I know why: it's made by a fellow Accessifier!
I think "great sampford" is such a rare term that your result isn't as watertight as ours. A search for "sampford" finds you in 5th out of ~184,000. But that's still impressive, your school site is beating sites for whole towns and areas, such as sampfordarundel.org.uk.
Matt:
| Matt wrote: |
| That said, your own name is pretty easy to appear for. |
Most interestingly, we beat calthorpe.bham.sch.uk which is the same type of domain name (county.sch.uk). Their domain has an exact match for "calthorpe" match and we still beat them by 5 places.
So yeah, the result looks pretty solid to me.
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| Cerbera wrote: |
| Yeah, it's not exactly "web design" in the competitiveness stakes. However, the search isn't for calthorpe park school, it's just for calthorpe. We are beating calthorpe.co.uk, calthorpe.com and about 380,000 others. |
Oh, definitely. It's a great result and a good example of how good principles pay out. I just thought it was worth noting Calthorpe might not be the term you want to target in an SEO kinda way.
Matt Machell
Web Design and Development Blog
Member of the Multipack
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[ot]
| Quote: |
| …Great Sampford… |
Sorry for bringing this up…
Am I missing something or is it just a little ironic that the accessibility style links which provide access to high-contrast, unstyled, etc… versions of the page are (needlessly) js-dependent?
[/ot]
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Ben, thanks for the praise! I must admit I shudder to remember what the Gt Sampford site was like when I first launched it back in 2000, but in about 2003 I cottoned on to the accessibility thing and - thanks largely to accessifyforum - learned my craft and steadily made improvements. What's more it was my experience on this site (and then others) that gave me the confidence to campaign for a formal approach on accessibility at a certain high street bank at which I work and then turn it into a career.
Bill, blimey, if it's not someone commenting on validation errors it's someone commenting on the use of JavaScript
The accessibility purist in me can understand why you pointed it out, but then again the realist in me says, hey, it's the icing on the cake:
- Some people might find it useful.
- Its presence promotes awareness about accessibility and the need to consider people's viewing preferences.
- If you don't have JS enabled then you don't get to see the link (but if you're savvy and using Firefox, for example, you can still access the alternative styles).
- It's quick and cheap to implement.
- It does no harm.
That all being said, if there are ways of providing alternative styles without using JS and cookies (which I just copied off of A List Apart) then please point me in the direction so I can investigate further... there's always more to learn.
I've got to say, though, that I've never considered JS an accessibility issue per se, it's what people do with JS that causes the problems.
Graeme.
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Oh, I forgot to say (well, it was late when I replied) that what I'd really like to provide on all my sites is something like the BBC's display options.
I've asked my contacts in the Beeb whether this is something they'll be sharing in due course and I'll you know the outcome.
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Please take alternate website colour schemes and accessibility of script techniques elsewhere. Accessibility stylesheets looks like a good destination.
I contacted Hampshire this evening about the link. I guess "working navigation links" should go in the list of "things the site does not have or do".
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Hi, Just thought i would also mention that Calthorpe Park School is also listed in the DMOZ directory and we all know how much that helps!
Also, i have a question... when you search for 'Calthorpe' in google you see a nice top of the first page result... and under it you see
Student Resources - calthorpepark.hants.sch.uk/student/
Spring 2007 Dates - calthorpepark.hants.sch.uk/calendar/2007/spring.htm
News & Events - calthorpepark.hants.sch.uk/news/
New Admissions - calthorpepark.hants.sch.uk/admissions/
How does this happen? Does anyone know? I mean i know its a collection of relevant links to pages on that site but who works it out? Google or can you do something to help push it?
Cheers
James Mills
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I've done nothing specific to create or affect that additional listing. We don't have an XML Sitemap, so we haven't indicated those pages are especially important within our website.
It seems to happen when the first result has clear URIs for its first-level sections names which are similar to more detailed searches users might have run.
So maybe it sees .sch and knows that /student/, /calendar/ and /admissions/ are areas which would be relevant. This could be tied in with keywords people used in queries which led to them clicking a .sch domain. Or something. A "News & Events" area would probably make that list on any site.
For companies listed on major stock markets, it displays financial information and other auxillary stuff. This is probably tied into their 3rd party stock markets data, so it's very much a part of their system.
It's a cool feature but I don't know how they make it so smart.
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The bug in Hampshire's server never got fixed. I've given up and changed the URI to http://calthorpepark.hants.sch.uk/new-admissions/. 
If you come across any myths about SEO, post them here and we can check whether Calthorpe has them or not.
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