…or keep it simple, keep it clean.

If you have read my blog then you will know that I have been building a few websites for people that have helped me get healthy in the last year.  My yoga teacher’s website, http://www.myoneonone.com, for a long time was not really ranking for what she does, yoga.  You could search for Yoga Glasgow and she would be way down the list, even though she is probably one of the best, in my humble opinion, due to her experience.  Between herself and her husband, Tobias, they really have cornered the alternative health, or as someone said to me recently, original health, market.

And for about 2 months, I was playing with the copy on her pages, with the page titles, and the meta data.  And I noticed that most of these companies ranking at the top did have fewer words in their titles, so that yoga and glasgow we less diluted.  So I tried it.  I changed Simone’s home page and a couple of other pages to say “Private Yoga in Glasgow | MyOneOnOne” with sub pages being “Private Pregnancy Yoga in Glasgow | MyOneOnOne” etc.

She is now second in Google when you search for Yoga Glasgow, second only to Siobhan Fitgerald’s Yoga Glasgow website.  Siobhan get’s top due to her URL being http://www.yogaglasgow.com – which I need to remember to show you all because we just went live with my new version.

What makes me laugh is that I have been reading up on all these techniques and ways to help boost your SEO, and it actually came down to the original and clean techniques of Title and Copy.  http://www.myoneoneone.com is linked only from a couple of websites, but they are sufficiently important websites that we get crawled quickly enough.

So screw all your SEO techniques and just keep it clean and simple.

[Edit]

Stupid Google.  I have just did the same search in 2 other browsers – IE8 and Chrome – and they have both got different search results.  I am just hoping it’s a data center caching thing and that very shortly this will be replicated across them.  Will keep you posted, if you care enough to come back.