Try this at Home
During the summer of 2004, my good buddy Randy Brown of Web-Magic created a freebie website for my dad, Hoffman & Associates. Dad needed to increase his private investigations and polygraph business and establish a web presence. So we decided to help him out. We came up with a very simple design with the right keywords and photos.
By December, I realized my blogging efforts were paying off elsewhere so I decided to apply them to a little experiment, using my father’s business.
With the keywords that matter most, we now show up on Page One of a Google Search in just three months. That’s pretty darn good for a local business with $0 budget.
Now on to my dad’s best friend, an arbitration and mediation attorney, that happens to have a little money for marketing this month. Randy has created a basic website and I’m helping with the content and press release.
I created a simple blog and I’m in the process of filling it with keywords and developing a strategy for weekly or monthly updates to keep it somewhat fresh. We are starting from absolute scratch on this project. This attorney didn’t have email until last summer. I’ve been hounding him for years to catch up with the rest of the world.
My experiment this month is to see how fast we can get his main site and blog into the search engines on a guerrilla marketing budget. I’ll let you know this summer.
Filed under: BLOGthenticity, Business Blogging, General, Greg, Why Blog?
At the risk of being accused of one-upmanship, my record for a #1 ranking on Google for a key search term is four days. And it’s never moved. Granted, I used web building software with a subdomain, but I targeted my keywords and description very carefully.
However, with my main site and blog relating to Butler Sheetmetal, I now find I have to be very careful as I can basically rank on the first page on Google for almost any keyword regardless of the number of competing web pages.
I wrote one dumb post about potato prices and found it ranked #7 out of about 1,400,000. Once I’d found this to be the case via my referrals, I tweaked another post as a little test and ranked #1 for the same term in a couple of days.
Blogs are quite scary as SEO tools. If I wanted to be relatively unscupulous I could just write a load of posts with my main search terms in the title and own the first two pages on Google.
But, as we say over here, that’s just not cricket.
Nevermind having conversations, you can completely monopolise the buggers. That’s simply not right.
To me, it doesn’t matter if it’s one week or three months. I don’t have time to check out the search engine progress. I’m just happy it works with minimal effort and time.
These are small sites with small blogs.
Absolutely, it doesn’t half take all the donkey work out of everything.
Here’s a nifty little free tool to help you check all your keywords and their rankings:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/
Works a treat.
Ya wanna know how to rank #1 in search engines?
I do it all the time as a stupid ass game, but I don’t spamdex or any other malicious or dubious tactic.
I invent new words and phrases. That’s all. Simple. Easy. Fun. And it has great value.
don’t pooh pooh this idea. I mean good new words you define and that have a real purpose, that fill a void, describe something no one else has made a word for yet. Coin words. That’s what Christopher Locke does in his sleep: Entropy Gradient Reversals is genius and very meaningful and useful once you understand it.
Like “bloatosphere”. Or “blogology”. Or “scumblog”. Or “collisional apostrophic blog consultant wanker”. (my favorite thus far)
As for solicitor blogs, he is way behind the times. Lawyers are starting blogs faster than almost any segment I know of.
Ernie the Attorny.
Bag and Baggage.
Corporate Law Blog.
to name just a few off the bottom of the top of my decapitated head.
You bring up good points Greg. Good fortunato on your projects.
But get him to post more than that. Once a week is minimum. Otherwise, the blog will fail due to appearing lazy, uncommitted, or even abandoned.
Infrequent blog posting is like a radio station that is only on the air on the third Wednesday of every other month. Not good, IMHO. I’m crabby today, cuz I’m happy.
P.S. I left out the most important aspect of the Neologism Search Engine Tactic, the one ingredient that actually makes it work, but I am keeping that a secret, for paying clients and Robert and Paul and Auburn students only. Not for the “collisional apostrophic business blog consultant wankers” out there who would too gladly take my idea and use it to impress their ignorant clients who are so unwary and gullible.
The one missing ingredient took me a while, almost a minute, to figure out, then another several seconds to formulate in “consultant sultan” language fire. Do you then blame or mock me for keeping it secret? You have to do more than just coin a word or phrase.
Every now and then a few of the SEO experts will hold a competition to see who can rank #1 on Google for a made up phrase by whatever means they see fit. The last one they held was to rank for the term ’seraphim proudleduck’. You then get hundreds of SEO types wildly scrambling about using any old method to get to the top. It’s probably the closest thing you’ll find to internet street drag racing, or something.
Other than that, you can actually go to http://www.wordtracker.com and dig through various keywords to find those which might be less competitive and more niched for your business.