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.

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.

Seo Experiment Day 18 of 30 Graphic Design

It is day 18 of the 30 day seo experiment.

The goal of the experiment is to:

1. Blog every work day
2. Sign up for as many social networks as possible
3. Read everyday about SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) Basically how to show up on Google.
4. Network with other bloggers and leave real comments

So far so good. I have noticed an increase in traffic as well as a better rank in search results. Throughout this experiment I have received some questions from clients and friends. Here are a few with some answers.

1. What is a blog? Surprisingly not everyone is familiar with blogs or how they work. Most blogs are focused on a specific topic and consist of one persons opinions on that topic. The blogger or blog owner writes on a regular basis about the topic that they want to be the expert on. The writing is generally casual and asks the readers to comment and share their opinions. The blogger can choose to approve those comments or delete them.
2. What is SEO? SEO stands for ( Search Engine Optimization). SEO is a lot of things and every post that is part of this experiment touches on different parts. But basically SEO is Optimizing your website to rank well on search engines for specific keywords.
3. What are Keywords? Keywords are the words that get typed into the search field on Google. You as the website owner decide what words you want to show up for. For example, Rush Design Group wants to show up for 3 basic Keywords or Key Phrases: logo design Nashville, graphic design Nashville, branding Nashville. So I make sure those words are on my site as much as possible.
4. Why do you keep spamming me? Sorry, I have been trying to promote my blog to everyone I know. Unfortunately not all of my clients, friends, and family like to hear from me everyday. What I have learned is that Facebook, Twitter ,and other social networks offer a passive form of contact I can say what I am doing with out demanding anyone read it. Emailing often may not be a good way to go if you want to promote your site. Although a Newsletter once a month has shown to be very productive.

I can’t believe how productive this experiment has been only 18 days in. I look forward to updating everyone on the final results. Leave a comment if you enjoy the post and if you are tired of hearing about it.

Link Building / Give and Hopefully Receive

Link building is an important part of getting traffic to your site. Many sites recommend different ways of getting links. Some you can pay for some you can ask for and if you just have an all around awesome site people will just link to you because.
One tip is to contact a site directly. Kind of like the people that come to your house and ask to clean one room of your carpet. “Hey thanks for coming by and all but I don’t know you and I’m not sure I want to let you in my house. And who told you I had dirty carpet?” The same is true on the web. Contacting a person directly is a little weird if they have never heard of you. So I will take a different approach. If I send a random person a gift with my return address they may send a thank you back. Let the Giving begin! Oh and let me say that this is not only an effort to build links but these are posts that I believe would be good for my clients to read. So check them out. Really. Just click on the link.

The first blog I have read today was about the value of the newsletter. We offer newsletters at Rush Design Group and this guy says they work. Post Title: How 24 Hours of Work Will Send Millions of Readers to My Blog

Secondly, and I found this blog useful. The post is Monitoring your online brand. This is worth the time to read. The part that I tried immediately was to search for links to my site from other sites using Google. Type in google link:www.yoururl.com. Just put your actual website name in though.

Youtube Monetization: More to come This post talks about the success businesses have using youtube. Every business should have at least one video on youtube regardless of how boring. Because if you ever upset the wrong person you may find an angry customer video slandering your good name with nothing up to say otherwise. It has happened to clients of mine.

Ok this is a good one. Why Hank Hill and I agree on Social Media Basically why businesses should have a myspace page. You don’t have to put pictures of the boss from the Christmas party but you should have something up.

I have used Google’s Pay Per Click program in the past and Managing ads on the Google Content Network gives some tips on how to maximize the results.

Ok so twitter is something not so new but becoming very popular. I will try it today and let you know how it goes. I found this post, Brand Yourself With a Twitter Background , He also has a post of why you should follow him I think these are also great reasons why you should have a twitter. I think this could also serve a practical use for businesses.

Last but not least if you need a head shot or are getting married this is The Best Photographer in Nashville. And all around good people.

I am updating this post as I read blogs this morning so check back often. I will let you know what results I get from this process. This is part of the SEO experiment. To read all the associated posts click on seo experiment in the categories section.

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.

Face Book Test

I just left a note on my Facebook profile to see how much traffic it could generate. If everyone visits and everyone shares the link on their profile it could generate some traffic.

If you are coming from Facebook click on the Facebook Icon at the bottom of this post.

thanks for your help. leave a comment

SEO Experiment / Better Blogger

I have been on the SEO expirement for a few days now. I have started looking for other blogs with similiar content or similiar goals to increase traffic. I found one site that a blogger is on a 30 day challenge to become a better blogger. I have decided to follow the blog and see if I can apply some of the tips. Here is the link to the challenge.

This week I will also try starting a chain letter to all my friends and family. I hate chain mail and never pass them on. I only reply to let them know that the computer they had hoped to get after forwarding the letter to 100 people is a cell phone model # and they where tricked. So while I hate chain mail I will embrace it ,as I have embraced social networks, and the people who pass it on to benefit my site traffic.

Be Sociable. Why not?

I hope this provides a way for my readers to keep up with and share the blog a little better. You should see some links to common sites that you may already be apart of. This is all apart of the SEO experiment that was started today.

Here is a link to the plugin