Negotiated Client Project: Website Complete

Today I finished the final stages of SEO and testing. The website is now live at this location:

Phoenix Driver Training

Here is a screenshot of the home page:

Following registering the site with Google's Webmaster Tools and Analytics I am waiting for the Google search engine to crawl and index the site; once this happens I will be able to test the site's ranking for a set of keywords relevant to this business and location.

I have tested the site on a range of browsers and devices; here are my results:

Chrome on Windows Vista: perfect
Firefox on Windows Vista: perfect
Opera on Windows Vista: perfect
Safari on Windows Vista: perfect
Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista: full screen is almost perfect with graceful degradation (background image is replaced with a colour as IE8 cannot fully stretch background images). DIV alignment brakes down when screen size is reduced smaller than 961 pixels wide.
Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista: major alignment problems

Chrome on Windows 7: perfect
Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7: facebook like/share buttons are not perfectly vertically aligned (a few pixels too low).

Default browser on Android 2.3.6 smart phone: perfect
Firefox on Android 2.3.6 smart phone: perfect

As with any website it is almost impossible to get it perfect on every device and browser but I am happy with my test results so far.

My next step is to continue testing on browsers on university machines and finally write my project book and evaluation.

Research Project: Fifth Artefact - Link Building

In my final artefact I will be looking at building back links to my test website and analysing how this affects the ranking for my chosen set of keywords.

Reputable back links can increase the PageRank of a website and this can make it look more important to search engines and thus increase the ranking in search results. According to this source back links can have a total weighting of 40.09% upon ranking factors on Google. It is also worth noting that the Google search algorithms have now learned to disregard spammy mass purchased back links in favour of quality reputable links from sources which are relevant to the subject matter of the website.

As well as the back links which already existed on this blog, facebook, twitter etc. I decided to add more links on places which I felt were relevant and would have the biggest impact; these were:

Buckin' Burrito Google + page.
Google Places - a facility for registering businesses on Google maps.
Yelp.co.uk - a directory for restaurants
Urbanspoon.com - a directory for restaurants
Ufindus.com - a general directory for businesses
Yell.com -  a general directory for businesses

I waited a week after placing all the links and tested on Google for my chosen set of keywords. Here are my results:

before (on 29/01/2014):

mexican food in sheffield - no listing
burrito bar sheffield - page 2, position 1
burrito sheffield - page 3, position 2
buckin' burrito - page 1, position 6 

after (on 5/02/2014):

mexican food in sheffield - page 8, position 10
burrito bar sheffield - page 1, position 9
burrito sheffield - page 1, position 5
buckin' burrito - page 1, position 4 

I am pleased that my first and most general keyword (mexican food in sheffield) has now for the first time featured my website in Google search. I believe this is due to the fact that in some of the directories I listed Buckin' Burrito as a Mexican restaurant and not just a burrito bar.

Overall there has been positive movement for all my keywords so it is clear that quality back links can have a significant positive impact on a website's ranking.

Next I will look at plotting all my test results from all my artefacts in a graph so I can tell which method of optimization has been most successful.