SEO Side Projects
I’m a firm believer that side projects are a great way to top up your SEO skills and experiment with new techniques.
My main side projects are:
Edinburgh Climbing Hub
Edinburgh Climbing Hub is a website I built that provides information about different climbing gyms in Scotland’s capital city.
To challenge myself, I coded this website in HTML/CSS without using a CMS or a website builder.
Why I decided to build it
My old mentor, Tom McCallum, encouraged me to take on David Sottimano’s devilishly hard SEO tasklist. After you’ve completed a lot of web development theory questions, David challenges you to build a 10 page website without a CMS and get it ranking.
The main point of the challenge is:
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To help you understand how websites work under the hood
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To help you communicate better with developers
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To challenge you to build and rank a website from scratch
As a passionate amateur climber, I felt there wasn’t a great deal of quality information online about rock climbing and bouldering in Edinburgh, so I jumped into the topic!
How I built it
💻 Started with Atom as my VDE, but later switched to VS Code.
🎨 Used the Bootstrap CSS Framework
🧗 Went to each of the climbing walls and took pictures and got information
📷 Basic photo editing in Canva
📈 Installed Google Analytics and set up Search Console for basic tracking
SEO tactics deployed
It’s fair to say that playing around with Edinburgh Climbing Hub has been a lot of fun!
Some of the techniques I’ve used include:
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Created and manually submitted the XML Sitemap: Most sitemaps are handled by content management systems, so this was a first for me.
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Used HTML Tables: By using HTML Tables on pages about climbing gyms, the site doesn’t just go after head terms, it goes after longer tail queries. A good example of this is my page about Alien Bloc bouldering gym. Here, the HTML table answers a lot of the common questions someone might have before going to the gym.
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Set up canonicalisation and redirects: Canonical tags and 301 redirects were implemented where necessary.
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Secured HTTPS and improved global delivery with Cloudflare: Cloudflare give you free SSL on their free tier, which is an absolute godsend for side projects!
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Conducted keyword research: I’ve used Ahrefs and SEMRush extensively in the past, so I was keen to try a cheaper option given the site isn’t revenue generating. I ended up using Long Tail Pro for my keyword research.
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Internal linking throughout the site: Ensuring pages were naturally linked throughout the site.
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Fixing errors using Screaming Frog: This is still a work in progress, and I’ll often deliberately break things to have a go fixing them again.
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Wrote 13 pages of copy: All optimised and edited.
Results
I’m happy to say the site gets some modest traffic.
You can follow along with the site’s progress with this Looker Studio Dashboard I made.
Dundee University Law Society
In 2015, I was President of Dundee University Law Society. In a bid to attract corporate sponsorship, we made a Wordpress website.
I didn’t know it then, but our efforts to get the site included in Google’s index would go down as my first SEO Project.
Our efforts included:
🔗 Foundational links from Dundee university’s main site and LawCareers.net.
✍️ Regular blogging
🏠 Set up a Google My Business Profile
📊 Installed Google Analytics
While the site has been completely redesigned since then, I’m glad to see the current committee still using our old domain!