SEO Experiment Finished

As you may remember on Nov.22 I decided to conduct an SEO experiment of sorts. The goal was to motivate my self to blog, network online, and increase my Search Engine Results. The Experiment has gone very well and I have enjoyed the process. I will continue to blog and network because I have seen such great results. I hope that the results will encourage you to do the same. So with out further delay here are the results in comparison to the starting stats.

Beginning Stats – Current Stats as of today.

Google Rank

graphic design Nashville – p 13 – p 3

logo design Nashville – p 5 p2 new blog www.logodesignnashville.com p 1 second spot

print design Nashville – p 9 p4 with no additional optimization for that Keyword phrase

branding design Nashville – p 2 p1 first spot WOW!

brand design Nashville – p 9 p2 new blog www.logodesignnashville p1 forth spot

Rush Design Group traffic last month 166 – 242 since Nov.22nd

Rush Design Blog Last month 84 – 769 since Nov.22nd

Also during this experiment www.rushdesigngroup.com/blog received a 1 page rank.

Thank you for reading I hope that you have found this SEO work interesting. Please continue to read. There will be few post between now and the new year but I will throw out a tweet is something goes up.

Why you should read about Logo Design and Graphic Design

Here is a casual video of why you should be reading this blog on a regular basis. I hope the bandage on my pinky is not distracting. I whacked it in a cheese slicer accident. Do not worry I am left handed and can still deliver great design.

Dutch Cheese is my Favorite.

What is a Keyword? Why You should care.

Today’s post is brought to us by Jeff Howard. Jeff works independently out of Catch Search Marketing. His client base includes local small business, B2B and large B2C consumer driven websites. Jeff can be reached best via e-mail. He also blogs about search marketing. I asked Jeff to answer a few questions on keyword research. His answers are below and I’d also like to point out if you are totally new to SEO, or just keyword research he has recorded a 4 part video series on search marketing.

Q: What role does keyword research play in SEO?
A: I think of keyword research as similar to choosing a storefront sign. For instance, if your a printing company owned by a guy named Dean then usually you choose something like “Dean’s Printing.” That is straight forward stuff and in the real world you only have one store front sign. This isn’t true on the web, on the web you have many pages and because search engines can rank each page ultimately you can choose a number of keywords to represent your business online.

Q: How many keywords should I focus on? and do phrases count as keywords?
A: A keyword usually is described as one word, while a phrase is a group of keywords. For example, a keyword phrase would be “Search Marketing Services.” Clearly, this phrase is made up of many keywords. The number of phrases you choose is based on a number of factors.
1) The size of your website
2) The amount of time you can devote to SEO
3) How well your website’s structure is built for SEO.

Q: How do I decide what keywords are best for my business?
A: Keywords should be chosen on a number of factors, and this is where it gets tricky. Probably the up most rule is to choose keywords based on relevance to the content on your website. If your Michael Bluth and run a banana stand, typically your keywords need to reflect exactly what it is you do. For example “Frozen Bananas in Santa Monica.” Its also important to avoid choosing keywords that are too broad. For example, the Bluth’s would not want to optimize a site for just “bananas.” There will be way to much competition for this keyword and they will be buried in the SERP’s forever. There are just so many factors that go into this step of SEO, its difficult to answer. I’ve found this PDF from polepositionmarketing.com that explains keyword research very well

Q: How do I know if my keywords are working
A: The best way to know if your keywords are working is to track your search engine referrals using most any analytics packages. Google Analytics is free, used by a lot of folks and will make it easy for you to find out what keywords people are using to find your website.

Q: Do keywords effect my Pagerank with Google
A: What keywords you target will not afftect your Pagerank. Pagerank is a metric that is suppose to show the value of the links pointing to your site. I personally believe Pagerank is a near meaningless metric, unfortunately it has popular appeal. PageRank is helpful to get an idea as the age and backlink profile of a website. Here is why I see PageRank as meaningless. Lets say your website gets 100 search engine referrals from 10 different keywords a month. You also know 5% of these visitors contact you for business, and 2% actually buy something. Do you care what your pagerank is? Its cool and fun to have a high pagerank, but thats the extent. I’d rather have a website working for my business with no PageRank than one not working with a PageRank of 10.

I hope these answers help provide a starting point for keyword research, its certainly one element of SEO that takes time to learn, perfect and manage. I’d like to point out, Google provides a very good keyword research tool for free. Finally, if your looking for a short primer about how to begin keyword research check out the video my website by clicking play below.

First Video Post / SEO Experiment Graphic Design

So this is the first video post. This is part of the SEO experiment. I hope you enjoy it. I didn’t spend a lot of time making it look great I just wanted to test it out and get it on the blog. Please let me know what you think.

What is Feed Burner. Why you should use it.

So if you are one of the many that read this blog every day and check it regularly for new content you will be happy to know that there is a service that will deliver the newest posts directly to you. A Lot like USPS except it doesn’t cost me anything and you don’t have to put on your slippers to go get it. The most popular service is Feed Burner. I have just added it to this site and the icon is in the right column.

So How does Feed Burner work.

It is really quite simple and free. When you click on the button that says subscribe in reader it will take you to a new window. You will see something that looks like this.

You will likely see a familiar logo. Maybe you have a yahoo account or a Google account like most intelligent people. These companies that you use to check your email along with others have caught on to this popular blogging kick and have created readers. A reader is like a newspaper customized by you. All of your favorite blogs that you subscribe to like this one and this one will be included in the reader. So instead of trying to visit all of the blogs that you like with your morning coffee. You can open the reader and see them all in one place. This is also convenient when you find a blog that you may want to visit again but may not remember the URL. You can subscribe in your reader or bookmark it. If they let you down with boring content you can unsubscribe. It is like breaking up or just not answering the phone anymore. It’s ok it will likely make them a better person in the long run.

Why You Should Use It.

Because it is awesome. And because blogs usually have the latest news and trends affecting your industry or hobbies. You can stay in the know and become more intelligent and better looking as a result. It also lets the blogger know that you thought the blog was worth keeping track of. That is a great morale booster. As you can tell by the feed burner readers on this site, that unless I get some clicks soon morale could be low. But this is the season for giving so why not throw out a charity feed and sign up.

Have you ever used a Reader or Feedburner? Leave a comment.

SEO Experiment / A new blog www.logodesignnashville.com

I registered www.logodesignnashville.com a couple of years ago because it was a keyword that I wanted to rank well for. I did not have a site up, but I had it forward to my main website. It really did not help much because it was a forwarding domain. But during the seo experiment I decided to put a blog up on the domain. A couple of days after putting it up with no content it was ranking on the first page of Google results for the keywords ” logo design Nashville” So since then I have tried to get some worthy content on the site. There is not much there but I will be updating it often. And hopefully it will result in a increase in business. I’ll let you know.

SEO Experiment day 11 of 30 Being a responsible blog reader

I have to say that this has been a great experience. I am very happy with the results. Not just the increase in traffic, but the great blogs that I have found while trying to get mine noticed.

After posting a comment on a blog that I had read one day and making a post about that blog I received record high traffic. There was not much of a record to break but it broke none the less.

So what I have learned through this is that we need to be Responsible blog readers. When you read a blog leave a comment if you like it. This encourages the writer to continue writing. Or if they have a digg icon at the bottom of the post digg the post. If you have a facebook profile put a link on your facebook. I have had a few and I mean very few friends put a link on there facebook and I did notice a spike in traffic. As a new blogger this makes me feel awesome. Which makes me want to continue writing.