SEO for "Philadelphia Web Design" - The Keyword

Nothing like putting your money where your mouth is!

For the past 6 months I've been documenting some Joomla SEO practices for my own benefit using this site as my testing ground. The test was to find out as best I could how the search engines are currently processing some of the SEO techniques I"ve been implementing. My area of study for this test was local search results.

For many small business owners that are looking to generate local leads from their website this is a main concern. The good news is that this area is usually wide open (unless you are an SEO business) for most business niches. Here I am targetting the term"'philadelphia web design".  Not an easy term as all the folks competing for it are web professionals and SEO companies and not plumbers or carpenters.

Let's take this site as an example though. Here is a graph from one of my rank checking tools that shows my path to the number 3 spot currently in Yahoo. Yes, I said Yahoo not Google. More on that later.

Ok, to get this graph on the page I had to shrink it but you can make out the numbers. I redid my website back in July and then started actively promoting and optimizing it. You can see that at this time my ranking in Yahoo was roughly 172. That's page 17 if you are doing the math!  Not a great place to be if you want clients to find you.

The interesting thing to notice is the progress up the rankings. It looks more like a professional blackjack players earnings graph. Periods of success then followed with periods of failure but ultimately the player wins. In this case rather than using card counting techniques as an SEO professional I use SEO practices. All white hat techniques mind you.

Each major bump up in ranking was a particular technique being tested. Some of the failures were figuring out how Joomla worked. For instance I had a big drop in ranking around October. I dropped almost 60 spots in a week. This had me pulling my hair out as I didn't do anything to the site as far as content and nether did my competitors from what I could tell.

Turns out I did install what was supposed to be a top-notch editor for the Joomla backend. Thiis editor was a commercial product but it caused 72 CSS & HTML errors to my site as soon as I installed it. I didn't notice anything visually to the site at the time as it looked the same. After I tried to troubleshoot what happened by running one of my SEO tools over the site, the errors showed in the report. I uninstalled the editor component and had my ranking back in a week .

Joomla SEO Practices Work!

The good news for all you Joomla site owners is that yes Joomla SEO practices do work. For themost part I was just doing strict on-page SEO practices. I also (Here's a tip...) put some effort into Yahoo Answers. If you don't know what Yahoo Answers is you might want to check it out. It's a great way to not only get traffic but also start positioning yourself in your niche. The backlinks you can generate don't hurt either!

My next article will talk about my efforts to get higher ranking for this site inGoogle. A definitley tougher nut to crack.

Why am I ranked #3 in Yahoo and #24 for 'Philadelphia Web Design". We'll take a look in the next article.