www.markpenneygallery.com

I had been tasked with barkleyadventurestation.com‘s recent update and remodel.

The site had a respectable amount of content an a functioning design. The main issues stemmed from table layout / authoring techniques that have become outdated. ( don’t get me wrong here – it was probably fine when it was first published) It’s an unfortunate fact that most people use google as their search engine – so optimization for google and other search engines, is a must. Google doen’t seem to like these techniques, sometimes missinterpreting the importance of content, or disregards it all together.

So I started out by remaking the existing site (more or less) in clean HTML and CSS.  SEO’d somewhat. I made a sitemap, a robot.txt made redirects for all the missing pages.

The site got a PR 3 (Pangerank of 3) after a couple of weeks of the updates going live. Placement in results had improved somewhat, traffic increased dramatically.

It seemed that a more aggresssive strategy would be required to rank well with the presence of other online competitors. We’d done everything well – but still geting outranked handily. A big advantage was identified with a blog formatted site (regular updated posts, SEO, compelling content, better client interaction) and I soon installed the blog site.

I cleaned up the main site and stripped it down to business functions, the rest was converted to blog format. In that format, the same SEO principals apply; relavant keywords in the titles, descriptions, body. Alt tags for images. WordPress plug ins are great for this.

The blog is showing a PR2 and traffic is stabalizing into a less erratic pattern. We’ve added a listing on google maps and added a test video on youtube. The site is gaining on it’s competitors,  I think it’s the best Salmon Fishing Charter in Ucluelet website yet. I’m working on Skipper Dave to do a podcast project; somewhere between a good flyfishing show and Deadliest Catch; If you think you might want to sponsor it – lemme know.