An old client of mine got in touch with me about three weeks ago, begging for help. Over the last couple of years, their site has lost all its rankings and they were desperate for change. I agreed to help with the following terms:

1. I would only be able to give them one, possibly two, months of my time.
2. Most of that time would be spent training them to do the work, rather than me doing the work. (Teach a man to fish kind of thing).

During the last few weeks, the training has taken up a large portion of the time, which is good. Training focus so far has been on learning how to blog and learning about backlinks. Here’s an outline of the few other things I’ve done:

• I’ve also been doing analysis work, looking for the on-site problems, and correcting them as I find them. Of note, the home page code had been funkified (messed up) by someone over the years. The result looked ok to the end users, but a bot may have been confused by the bad code. I also removed some old broken links leading to 404’s from a few pages.
• In addition, I created a blog as a separate section of the site so that the site could get some fresh content going. (The site had old, stale content for the last couple of years). A total of 4 blog posts have been made by the client.
• One backlink has been acquired from a blog directory (a somewhat low-quality directory).

As you can see from yesterday’s DigitalPoint keyword tracker tool, the site has had a huge resurgence in the SERPs. The green numbers denote positive movement for the associated keyword phrase (phrases are not shown).

Although there is more work to be done to move those rankings up to the top 10, at least they are now in a position to make some real moves. The obstacles to their rankings success have been removed, and that’s an important point. Before you can be successful in the SERPs, you have to remove some obstacles. Old stale content and funkified coding can be like a large iron door blocking the path to SERPs greatness. Breathing some fresh life into a site and making sure the code doesn’t cause a bot to stumble can make the difference between no rankings and decent rankings.

Now that the stumbling blocks have been eliminated, some off-page work should do wonders.

Technorati Tags: SEO, on-page optimization, funkified code

Original post by DazzlinDonna