I recently finished up a design project for Bristlecone Realty, a salt lake property management company I found through a friend.  It was a fun project, a clean, simple design with some embedded PHP and HTML elements that they could use with a WYSIWYG editor to make changes on the site they update frequently.

They also wanted some SEO work done and so I have also been tackling that this summer with the most mixed, unusual results I have ever had with SEO.   I am optimizing for the keyword string “salt lake property management” and right now they are sitting at #1 for MSN, #32 for Yahoo, and nowhere on Google.  Yup, one day we were steadily climbing around #45-50 and the next day it was delisted…why?  I have no idea.  I submitted a reconsideration form and am waiting on that.

A weird thing to happen when there appears to be nothing black hat at all about the site.  I scoured over every inch of the HTML and found only a period that was “hidden” to hold space in an area that was showing up differently in FF and IE.  I removed that and am now just waiting for Google to give the page back its proper place.

Meanwhile, you can check out the page at http://www.brgsaltlake.com

So my original goal for TimeClick software was to get them into the top 20 ranking on Google for time clock software. We hit that about a month and a half ago. So we upped it to top 10…and today…

…well, check out the screen shot below!

Just a few thoughts of mine on basic SEO tactics from TeenBiz.

(or right click here and select “save target as…” to download)

I’ve been working with Hawkeye Technology in Logan, UT for the last year or so. I was originally hired on as a marketing intern last summer and was put to work rewriting an email follow up program, newsletters, etc. However, their site was really in bad shape and I knew that a simple redesign could work wonders for their main product, TimeClick (time clock software).

My goals were: increase the current new customer rate (2/month) to 3 per week as well as land us on a 2nd page result for “time clock software” with Google.

They had an idea for a design, so I took that design, tweaked it a little bit so that their value proposition was a little bit higher on the page. I also combine a bunch of other pages that were doing nothing else than forcing visitors to click on more links than they had to in order to find out the info they needed to buy the software. This couple with a little on-site SEO work made me think that by May we could be on Google page two for “time clock software”.

The results? Well, already we are up to 1 new customer per week and we just cracked page two and are sitting at #19 on Google! This was done almost solely with on-site SEO as I just started working a couple weeks ago on building some backlinks into the site. The goals have now been tweaked because I am now vying for a first page Google ranking with the ideal being top 5…we’ll see what happens!