Our Web Story and Journey

This website started more than 23 years ago as I write this as a small personal website devoted to my interest and knowledge in Oracle security. The domain was registered in May 2001 but this was not my first site. I previously had a site on a domain owned by Demon and it came free or for a small cost with my ISP contract, so my website started probably in around 1998/1999. By July 2002 this website had become a commercial advert for people to hire me to help with Oracle security but also still included free tools, articles and more.

The above is the first capture from the web archive of my website in November 2002.

In the beginning web didnt get a lot of vistors; maybe a few hundred a month. I then wanted this to improve so I posted to forums, answered questions and wrote more content. This was in the days before social media of course! I created a blog dedicated to Oracle Security in September 2004; so around 20 years ago as I write this. This blog is of course still running and has almost 1600 pages today.

My website grew in size and also visitors due to two things in my opinion; size, the more pages that you have the more things you can rank for in search engines and writing for the visitor. I have always written articles as though i am speaking to someone. These things worked and now this site gets over 200,000 visits a month and we get between 5,000 and as high as 21,000 visits in a day.

Over the years i have spent time improving the website structure; we moved from a HTML tables design to CSS for instance and over the years added more meta tags and improved the speedc massively of the website by compresssing and reducing the size of images and code

Why Now?

Over the last 1.5 years we have focused quite a bit on the website and social media and created a lot more social traffic. We increased or social connections and followers to just under 45,000 and we increased the engagement and views hundreds of percent and the site visitors increased in the last 1.5 years by around 60% over this period.

Recently we did a review and a small plan of how we can move forwards again in terms of visits, interactions and more. We decided that to do this we would look and SEO companies and see what services they offer. What I realised is that we need to write more content and target areas that we (I) have not covered before but obviosuly in the areas of Oracle Security and also look at some of our existing areas and see how we rank in search engine and if necessary refresh this content so that it ranks higher.

We went through a process of looking at 5 or 6 SEO websites that allow free reports to see where we stood on our site and what could be improved. Two things happened; The first that we were and are still plagued by SEO spam almost certainly because of using these websites and secondly we were contacted by a number of them to offer us services. I spoke to a number of them as a result of this and all offered services that included a lot of things I didnt need BUT were clearly not removable from the service list. I spoke to two in detail and I explained that I wanted to increase search ranking primarily but none gave me confidence that they could do this. They may be able to but they could not convince me of that fact.

So, I decided to do it internally. We created software to analyse websites and to produce detailed reports of the current state of a website and also to assess competitor websites - the same software of course targetted at the competitor rather than our site.

The Fundamentals

If we take a step back and think about it; what can we change, do in a web page or website to attract customers? - Well we can change / write / design the structure of the website through decisions of the structure - levels of links / menus etc; we can decide on tags used and also how we write the website, i.e. use tables for style or frames or css and more. We can as authors of websites affect the techinal aspects and structure.

We can of course control the text and content of the website. That is completely at our disposal.

The third aspect of the website is what we as authors cannot directly or easily change. This is the incoming links from other websites. Yes, we can approach other websites and ask them to link to ours but this is a task a business owner does not have time to do. We can do the first two things much more easily; change the structure and change and add content

Examples of Success

After creation of the tools to analyse a website and its competitors we used this on many example websites and I want to share two examples of those here:

• A local business that wanted to get more customers wanted to rise in the rankings for their search keywords. They ranked 7th in Google at the time of our analysis and after three simple recommendations we made to the customer the website is now ranking 2nd for the same keywords.
• A second customers business wanted to rank higher in Google for their search words for their service and were also ranking 7th. After we reviewed their site and competitors we made two recommended changes to their content and now they are in 1st position in Google for the same keywords