How can a few changes to your website help you gain new customers? I am working with Sheila S. of NJ Playgrounds to make some technical changes on her site. We decided it would be beneficial to do a before and after post – here’s how many visitors certain pages received before and after the changes are made.

What technical changes are we making?

1. NJ Playgrounds was set up with numbered permalinks, the default in WordPress. We will be changing the permalinks from numbers to postname, as the postname will have keywords that are meaningful to the search engines. When we do this, each post will have to be redirected to the new permalink, as the search engines have indexed the posts under the old permalink. The redirection plugin will aid in this process. This change still needs to be done – estimated early June.
2. NJ Playgrounds did not have a meta description tag appearing in the code. We added one to each page. This change was made on May 22, 2011.
3. NJ Playgrounds had a code error – a banner was appearing before the DOC Type in the code. This was fixed and put in a proper place within the body of the page. This change was made on May 22, 2011.

What is the data we are comparing on the site?

The above chart shows unique visits via search engine to the site from April 21 – May 21, 2011. The data is gathered via Google Analytics.

This chart shows unique visits from one year ago, from April 21 – May 21, 2010.

Let’s look at the data for two specific park pages, one in Northern New Jersey and one in Central New Jersey:
2011:
Van Saun Park, Paramus, NJ – 448 unique page views
Johnson Park, Piscataway, NJ – 57 unique page views

2010:
Van Saun Park, Paramus, NJ – 1,001 unique page views
Johnson Park, Piscataway – 161 unique page views

Stay tuned as we gather the data for June 2011.

Why might statistics have gone down from last year to this year?

If you look at the numbers, you will notice that NJPlaygrounds got more hits last year in the spring than this year. So let’s come up with some theories about why this might be:

1. Perhaps the site was penalized for the code problem – when the banner was added at the top of the code, no DOC TYPE was appearing on the page.
2. Competition with other sites – other sites might be better optimized for SEO. It could be other sites have better descriptions or titles, or it could be they have more incoming links. Or both.

So now we have added the meta description tags, and we will be adding the permalinks with keywords instead of numbers. There may also be improvements to titles, such as adding Paramus, New Jersey to the Van Saun Park title tag. Come back in June or July, and there will be a post with new data. Will the changes help? Let’s find out.