A while ago I started a site to help people to reclaim their bank charges after the OFT decided that the fees banks charge for items like bounced cheques were illegal. The site was intended promote a local solicitor who is helping individuals claim their fees through the courts. When a suitable deal failed to materialise, I stopped any work on the site and did absolutely nothing to promote it.

After a discussion with another marketing partner in the same sector I had a look at the site today and found it ranked 8 in google for bank charge refunds.

I was somewhat amazed as a lot of the usual steps I take with the site hadn’t been done:

• No metatags (the description in google still reads “Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content management system.“

• No user friendly URL’s

Only today did I get round to using nice URL’s like http://www.bankchargerefunds.org.uk/10-steps-to-claim-back-charges.html

instead of

http://www.bankchargerefunds.org.uk/index.php?content=123&id=321

• No Google sitemap
• No user sitemap
• No directory or search engine submissions
• In fact hardly any content, most of the pages just have placeholders

Apart from the domain name and a few page titles, there was just nothing done at all to promote the site. I’ve finally got round to installing Google Analytics on the site so I’ll provide an update on the traffic stats when I have a better idea of what they are.

Next stop is to see what it takes to get my .org.uk domain name above the .co.uk domain name which appears to only have links from their design company’s website.