Frigate3.com and CoolUtils.com

Frigate3.com | was one of the Spider Friendly team's first SEO projects. The website is owned by Moscow's Alexander Buzaev and is dedicated to the Frigate File Manager, one of the most advanced products in the field; it was programmed by Alexander and his team and has improved significantly over the years.

By the time we started working on the site, it was a few years old and relatively well established. Our task was to achieve Top 10 positions in Google for a few important terms Alexander was most interested in. Admittedly it wasn't exactly our idea of a good SEO campaign, but since it was more like a test task, intended to prove that we really know what SEO is about, we said yes.

The site was nicely laid out, friendly to both search engines and users, and the visual design was very pleasant. It did require some basic SEO work, like tweaking the content on a couple of pages to add targeted keywords, slight changes to the internal navigation, a 301-redirect from the non-www version to the www one and a few fresh links to attract new visitors and to show the engines that the site is live and growing. The on-page parts (such as the title and metatags) were pretty routine and were completed relatively quickly. We then submitted the site to all the free web directories that were on our list at that time and initiated a few link exchanges with quality websites related in theme to Frigate3.com.

The results

About three months later, the site was on the first page in Google for the most important term and several others. Later, we wrote a few articles about Frigate file manager emphasising the product's various benefits.

To this day, the site maintains its good positions; what's more, the positions actually improved after the Jagger update, and got better still when Bigdaddy started. Some of our competitors that used to be better positioned lost their positions in those updates (presumably because of their heavily abused reciprocal linking strategies), but Frigate3.com flourishes. Sales have grown significantly, and the client is very happy with the results. "You are my best find of the year", was Alexander's brief but touching testimonial. But even more important to us was the fact that he later asked us to start doing SEO for his other site, CoolUtils.com.

Just like Frigate3.com, CoolUtils.com | belongs to Alexander Buzaev, a programmer from Moscow, Russia. Unlike Frigate3.com, CoolUtils.com features many different products (all developed by Alexander and his team), and is the most important website for Softplicity Development, the software development company owned by Alexander.

This opened a lot of possibilities. We could work on a lot of keyword combinations pertaining to different products and groups of products. We worked on a per-product basis, regularly adding more content (both marketing and educational) to improve users' experiences. Apart from that, several press releases were distributed across the Net, and we also submitted the site to free and paid web directories. However, reciprocal link exchanges were kept almost to zero in this case; the site didn't need them, being well established and very authoritative. We listed a few quality websites one way though, because we at Spider Friendly strongly believe that dead-end websites are no good for the Internet as a whole.

We suggested adding a site map, 301-redirecting the non-www version of the URL and validating the code of the website according to the W3C standards. Every step in the site's optimisation was discussed with Alexander in details; we continuously exchanged ideas and brainstormed them together. Everything we did to the site was done in co-operation, including keyword research, copywriting and marketing strategies.

Not everything went well from the start. To ensure there would be no duplicate content filters and penalties, we insisted upon removing a few other sites from the Net. Alexander used to have a few sites dedicated to separate products and they were often filled with content copied from CoolUtils.com and, of course, targeted the same keywords. It was a hard decision to make, but finally we found some common ground, and three auxiliary websites were scrapped and 301-redirected to CoolUtils.com - ruthless but effective.

The engines appreciated our readiness to co-operate with them and follow their guidelines. The authority of the CoolUtils.com site grew day after day; we celebrated new good rankings more and more often, and out mutual trust was now beyond question. Actually, we have become good friends.

The results

Started in April 2005, the project continues to this day. The results speak for themselves: in January-March 2005, the overall organic traffic from search engines was 14552 visits; in April-June this figure was 19840 visits; there were 35687 visits in July-September; and 61217 in October-December (in spite of the Jagger update). The first two months of the year 2006 (Bigdaddy's time) showed us 57943 visits from the search engines (organic traffic only). Notice that this two-month total is not far behind that of the last three months of 2005.

Professional SEOs and educated webmasters who follow search engine news and had to deal with the "Jagger" and "Bigdaddy" Google updates will appreciate the full implications.

Sales continue to grow proportionally with visits (and sometimes even faster). We are currently working on more keyword combinations and adding more content to make sure the online success of the website will improve still further in 2006.