Hello Everyone!

I wanted to highlight something I thought was interesting, and see if the group as a whole can take advantage of what I’ve learned.

Background
I was hired to run our MCIF (marketing database and information system). I have a strong background in database management and statistical analysis. However, I was also tasked with social media, website maintenance, and SEO. These I’ve been scrambling to learn.

SEO Before Me!
When I took over the SEO aspect of the site in December, we had 18% search traffic according to Google Analytics. The overwhelming majority of the traffic, roughly 70% was direct traffic, and the tiny little bit left over was referral traffic. 81% of the referral traffic was our online banking application dumping people on the home page after they logged out of their accounts.

SEO After Dec 5th, when I took it over
So we launched our new website (you can see it here) on Dec 5th, and added in the necessary Google Analytics tools. In preparing for this launch, I took some other actions as well:

1. Set up a Google+ Account, and though not very active, put some pictures up.
2. Set up Google Places for each Branch location.
3. Came up with some key words and a nice plithy paragraph describing BCCU on our homepage.
4. Stayed on top of clean and clear explanations for pictures.
   
5. Made sure that local websites had the proper address if they were linking to us.
   

A good chunk of that referral traffic is still from our online banking app (75.45%), but is now going to additional pages based on banner advertisements I set up within the app.

Now, I’m not sure if these results are good, bad or indifferent. I’m not trained in SEO. However, I have noticed some interesting facts:

• Before Places were set up, Referral traffic came from two sources, our online banking app, and our eNews/eStatement emails. Now, the banking app is still top dog, but is no longer just the home page. Both Facebook AND Google themselves are appearing in the top five, which I’ve confirmed by tracking our Facebook ad accounts, and the metrics provided for each Place page.

• Google Place metrics provide valuable feedback on what is causing you to appear, which can then be used to test your keyword usage.

• Google Place pages perform better then Facebook, even without Google AdWords. This caught me by surprise and may just be local to me. Do not trust this without further confirmation (I honestly believe that this is a statistical outlier and I’m going to test it over the next few months).

Anyway, that’s my report so to speak! I am wondering how much of this growth is the result of our page changes, and how much is the result of opening up G+ and Google Place pages. I am also not an SEO expert. So if you go to our homepage and see huge glaring errors of doom, don’t take em out on me (tips, on the other hand, are always appreciated)!

Jason

@hildaalanisgonzalez Well I can’t use all their services! We’re a credit union, so we’re strictly regulated. As such, we keep our site on a secured service set up for Credit Unions, and our email we keep local.

But I will see how much I can use! I was putting that up there so people can see what is possible just working on their own with no formal training.

I hope people find it useful.

Jason

@jasonreilly 
Looks like you’ve done a nice job and have gotten some positive results back. As I start working on a project with a client I have them sign up for both yahoo local and google places, I’ve found it’s a good way to get a jump on things once the site goes live.
Page loading speed has become a very important issue for search engines these days. Your site doesn’t have any glaring problems with this, but there are a number of things you can do to further optimize the site.
I’ll start off by recommending that you grab a copy of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Secrets 

There are a number of page speed addons and web pages out there to help you analyze your site. I would suggest adding YSLOW to your browser. It’ll give you a overall grade and grade specific best practices. It also will give you links where you can learn more about what you’re not grading well on.

http://www.webpagetest.org is website that will test your page loading. You’re not looking too good there. I’d use YSLOW first to learn and fix some of your issues first.

A few things that are often overlooked are a robots.txt file and xml sitemap. It doesn’t look like you have either. You should also research using the htaccess file to do things like ETAG removal and implementing pretty urls  (just be sure to use “force trailing slash”) I see you’re already forcing www, that’s good. Adding expires headers is another best practices. http://html5boilerplate.com/ would be a great place for you to learn a lot about this stuff.

Javascript really should be put at the bottom of your page. There are a few files that may be needed to load in the top, but it’s best practices to place them in the bottom.  

I see you have your google analytics code in the top.  The benefit of doing this is that you’ll get a high count (because it’s loading in the begining) If you place it in the bottom your content has a chance to load first (helps loading time) but if a user goes to your site and leaves before the page loads they wont’ be counted as a visit.  Personally I don’t think counting people who leave before your page loads need to be counted. And loading your content faster is more important. I would note that since you’ve already developed the site with javascript loading at the top you will probably run into issues moving it to the bottom. Scripts need to load before function calls which you probably have in the body of your content. So if you just cut and paste all your js links in the head of your document to the footer you’ll find things not working when the page renders.

Cheers!
Jules
PS – Other helpful links to resources
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
http://eisabainyo.net/weblog/2007/08/19/removing-file-extension-via-htaccess/

@jasonreilly

Looks like you’ve got a good plan, and yes “spiff” works:)