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This Old website – Ziff Davis 1up.com Site Redesign

We had the pleasure of working with the Videomaker team on increasing their web traffic. The Videomaker site provides a wealth of resources about video editing and video production. In April of this year they began a website redesign, and we included within that a number of SEO modifications to improve the visibility of the site to the crawlers. In this article, we will show you a few snippets of the site prior to the redesign, how it was changed during the redesign, and the results from a search engine traffic and crawler perspective. Here are the major steps that were undertaken:

  1. One key area we focused on was reducing the number of clicks from the home page to key content. On the original site, there was a lot of valuable content that was 4 clicks away from the home page. This was done through the implementation of site maps on the site to make all content accessible within 2 clicks. Links to the site map pages were added to the footer of the site:
Videomaker footer
  1. Another major change was moving CSS code from the HTML source code of the file into a CSS include file, and Javascript function definitions into a Javascript include file. The original source included code like this:
Videomaker CSS in HTML Source File

The new source code looks like this:

Videomaker CSS in Include Files
  1. The old site automatically redirected people from www.videomaker.com to www.videomaker.com/scripts/index.cfm. This created a major dilution of the inherent link strength (some of you may refer to this as page rank) of the site. If you look at the URL in the footer of the browser in this picture, you will see that the link points to the home page when we have our cursor over the logo:
Videomaker Home Page Redirect

Links from pages on the site to the home page all pointed to www.videomaker.com/scripts/index.cfm. Yet all the external inbound links pointed to www.videomaker.com. In Google’s latest page rank update, the site jumped from a PR6 to a PR7, largely because of this fix:

Videomaker Home Page PR 7

So we are all result oriented aren’t we? So let’s take a look at the results (note that growth percentages are all with respect to July):

Videomaker Stats

You gotta love it! Overall unique visitor growth of 67.59%, and page view growth of 69.40%. And this was achieved on a site that was already pulling decent traffic.
This is just the first in a series of such articles. We plan to have other “This Old Web Site” articles in the near future. And I owe a thank you to Matt Cutts for making the suggestion during my visit to the Googleplex back in September.
To learn more about Videomaker, please visit their excellent website about video editing and video production, or their blog with the latest video industry news and information.

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Eric Enge

Eric Enge is part of the Digital Marketing practice at Perficient. He designs studies and produces industry-related research to help prove, debunk, or evolve assumptions about digital marketing practices and their value. Eric is a writer, blogger, researcher, teacher, and keynote speaker and panelist at major industry conferences. Partnering with several other experts, Eric served as the lead author of The Art of SEO.

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