Case Study On Search Engine Rankings: This Is No Joke!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Perform a search for “april fools jokes” and you’ll find this site – April Fools On The Web – sitting at position 8. It’s exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to see what April Fools jokes were done online this year and this site tells it, plus I got an extra bonus: All the jokes online since 2004. I doubt, however, that it’s exhaustive.

But I got to wondering why this site didn’t come up No. 1 for my search. It has two of the three words in my search query in the URL, though only one of the top 10 in Google had the exact phrase as I entered it into the search box. Any idea where that one sat? At No. 1. And it was a .info domain. Let that be a clue as to the importance of your URL in search engine marketing.

Almost all of the top 10 had my three words in the description as well, though not all together as one phrase. Only the No. 1 spot had the complete phrase as I entered it in the description. That’s 2 for 2 for that site.

I changed my search query to April Fool’s Day and my site didn’t show up on page 1 of Google at all, despite the exact phrase in the URL (maybe it’s not so important after all?) and in the description. Why not? Is there a way to make this site rise in search rankings?

Yes, I believe there is, and you don’t have to look far to find search engine optimization opportunities. By clicking on View Source for both sites – April Fool’s Day On The Web and AprilFoolsJokes.info – I found that the site sitting at the No. 8 position is full of Javascript whereas the site at No. 1 is written with tables and the actual content for the site is higher up in the source code. You won’t believe how much of a difference that makes. The Javascript means that the search engines have to dig deeper to find actual content to crawl. That doesn’t work in your favor.

Here is my suggestion: Put the Javascript in a separate file and reference it with a one line code so that the search engines can get to your actual content much more quickly and seamlessly. This alone may not move the site from No. 8 to No. 1, but I’d be willing to bet that it will move it higher in the SERP.