Project report

SEO Project report

As a part of the course we had a great opportunity to help an actual company to get more traffic to their website and boost up the look of it. Here's a small summary of my thoughts:

1. What was your role, what you did? Did you participate in some group?

-  I was part of group 3, which took care of the SEO operations of the website. I chose this group because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and learn something that I haven't done before.

1. Links to your pages, blog posts ... 

-  As I worked with SEO, I did not create any new pages but I did some modifications, for instance changed the logo's place on the front page and deleted unnecessary information that was already there twice.

 I removed the name of the company from the upper right corner and added a new logo to the right. 

I also shortened the html links of the pages, installed Yoast -plugin to Wordpress and connected it to Google. That lifted the rank of the website in Google to 1st place (was ranked 6th before!). I also changed the title and the metadescription in the search engines. 

 

Before there was no name of the company in the title, only the slogan, which I think was very confusing so I changed it. There were many other features that came along with Yoast which made the website easier to find (XML sitemaps). In addition to those I did track down some of the best keywords for the website using Ubersuggest as a tool.

1. How you and the others succeeded?

- At first, I was a bit lost with my role and the tasks seemed a bit unclear. I had no access to the website as I am not the owner of the company, so I couldn't get the full experience with SEO. But later I could get my hands on the website and it was great to explore and try out things. I do think my findings and effort were really valuable for this project.

  I believe that some people inevitably did more than others in this project, but everyone could still work on something. The SEO group was pretty all over the place in my opinion because we weren't given any instructions and I at least did not know where to start. I had no idea how to play with SEO as it was all new to me. So I basically taught myself on the topic and did everything I could.

1. Would you like to continue with some topic related project in period 4?

- I think doing this project was fun and it was well oriented with the working life, so I would definitely do another one of these. 

1. What were the good things and what development needs you can see?

- Good thing was that our client, the representative of the company, was visiting us and tutoring us by sharing her thoughts and comments as the project moved forward. It was great to have the constant reminder that this project is real and very important for someone, not just an imaginary school assignment but an actual business project. As of development, I think that there should've been more guidance and planning for the team members. We had project managers, but they were just like any other student and therefore they had no more knowledge or skills to help us with. I was really wondering how I could contribute to the project in the right way.

1. As this is the first time for me having this course and this kind of task, would you propose this in the next year? 

- Yes, I think this project was a great idea for this course and would propose it to happen again. It really gave a whole new level of purpose to this course and it was great to see that we could help a real company with the problems on their website. I feel like I learned a lot from this experience. For some students these real company projects could even lead to new business opportunities.

1. Free voice, what else you want to say, extra feedback?

-  I really liked the project work and my choice of the teams, but for the next time I suggest that the teacher would take a more active role in the project and help us with the process. All the teams and team members were helping each other, but in reality nobody really knew what they were doing because we had not learned this stuff before.