A Search Engine Marketing Strategy

I have been commissioned (I don't know why I use this word.  I guess it sounds like a royal assignment  ) to do the SEO/PPC work on www.epickmeup.com, a transportation service company.  Client doesn't want to pay for a redesign, so I am basically wrapping wounds with better bandages, so to speak.

A brief history:
- Site had high page download time

- Headers weren't marked with in H tags but B tags

- There were no P tags.  The developer used double BRs

- Title and keywords were the same for each page

- Nav bars were inconsistent across the site

- No site map

- No external CSS/JS file.  Everything done either inline or on the page.

PPC solution:
In March, I registered the site with Adwords.  Site traffic jumped from 87 in February to 215 in March to 712 so far in April

SEO Solution:
Still in progress.  I intend to address the above in addition to:

- Coding for XHTML transitional because of all the tables

- remove html and inline styles from the tables and put them in external stylesheets.

- Validate his "reservations" page.  I already did this on the back-end.

Hopefully, with PPC already in place, it is only a matter of time before he sees SEO results.  The plan is get him to the top 5 ASAP.  This project is due May 1st.

Obviously, there won't be much cosmetic changes.  All changes will only be available via "view source".

If there is anything else you guys think I should take into consideration, do post it here.  Again, remember, I am not being paid to redesign and so I will keep such changes to the barest minimum.  The site only has 4 pages, so I didn't charge him much

Just thought I should share

Sorry loungr,

I meant top 5 results returned from a google search, SEO-wise.  This will be the result of semantic markup, rich keywords (as determined by words used in his industry), etc.

I hope this answers your question.

Actually loungr,

When I said "top 5", I meant SEO-wise, not PPC-wise.  For PPC, there is a lot of competition for keywords.  As a matter of fact, there are some words my client is paying $10 per click for. 

SEO-wise however, it all depends on link quality, keyword-density of your pages and semantic markup for your pages, among others.  Besides, google doesn't even use keywords as a criteria for SEO as many pple simply view source, copy and paste from their competition.

I hope this helps.

Not to beat on a dead horse, but again, I was paid to code for google and google doesn't place emphasis on keywords.  Keyword density, sure, but not keywords, as in meta tags.

backlinks r good but rnt all in all.  Take one of my personal sites, www.geocities.com/myibibio.  If at all, perhaps no more than 5 links worldwide (2 of which are from 2 sites of my own ).  But type in "Ibibio dictionary" (which by the way isn't part of my keywords if u view source), that site comes in #1.  So it sure isn't all about  backlinks.  There's more:

1) semantic markup

2) keyword density

3) site map

among others.

As a quick update:

I finished SEOing the site last friday.  As of April 24, 2007, the site came up in the top 3 search results returned for certain keywords.

Of course, since I told the client 4 - 6 months, I will keep my mouth shut for at least a month before giving him the news.  That way, it looks like a miracle 

It's nice to know that I am at least doing something right