But, in about 9 days I’ve launched the website purplewidget.com, moved to Google ranking spot # 4 and # 1 on Yahoo.  Not bad and just getting started.

#1 on Yahoo for Purple Widget

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.purplewidget.com&hl=en

It shows all 16 pages that existed (before this post created a new page).

Of course we don’t rank in the Top 30 for the search term purple widget just yet – in fact we’re not in the Top 500 results, but it should be noted that my personal blog that links to this site is the # 24 result on Google right now for purple widget…this post just went up yesterday.

I believe we are seeing 2 things demonstrated here.  First, blogs are well liked by Google.  My personal blog carries little authority and is not updated too often.  Yet, only a day after a new article shows up about purple widgets it is not only indexed but a Top 30 result for that term.  My personal blog has been around several months – a very short time in terms of websites in the history of time – but it’s not brand new is my point.  Of course – just a reminder, as is largely the point of this SEO experiment, the term purple widget offers little value as a search term due to it’s excessively low search volume therefore it has little competition.  Secondly, we are seeing evidence that an element of ’sandboxing’ is at play here.  Scotts2Cents.com is a relatively new and small site with low authority but it has been around 8 months.  And although indexed and clearly more content rich about purple widgets than my personal blog this site is not a Top 500 search result.  This is not surprising but an interesting note.

Okay, a bit more.  My name is Scott Endsley, I’m an SEO Marketing Strategist for VML in Kansas City.  I’ve been doing search engine optimization for several years and have talked to many clients and potential clients about how being optimized for search engines can help their website attract more traffic and potential customers (i.e. sales!).  Over the years of talking to clients who normally know little about what is an isn’t an optimized website and why it matters I’ve developed many examples of what is important.  And to me, and I believe many SEO’s will agree on this one, one of the – if not the – most important aspect of optmizing any website is keyword research.  One thing I’ve heard myself say over and over is the following: “You can rank #1 for purple widget on Google but if nobody is searching for purple widget it does you no good”.  So here I am.  Attempting to rank #1 on Google for the term “purple widget”.  The blog will take you step-by-step – or close to it – through the process I’m taking to attempt to achieve this goal.  

It should be pointed out that I really hate the color purple, I’m a Kansas University grad, contributor and huge fan so the color purple couldn’t be further from anything I like.  But for some reason that’s the term I started using.  Why not green widget or orange widget?  I don’t really know – but through the course of this blog I will be exploring those terms as well.

Disclaimer – every website is different, every client is different and everybody has different needs to improve search engine rankings. The methods used and documented in this blog may or may not work for your website or any website.  I’m also not going to bore you with every little detail.  I guess my point is (about time isn’t it) about my disclaimer is simply don’t try this at home.  I am a trained professional.

So how am I going to get a high ranking for purple widget?  First I’ll say that everything I’ll be doing is generally considered playing fair.  No sneaky tricks that may or may not be search engine “approved”, at least none intentionally.  I’ll be attempting to create good content, getting some links to the site, maybe creating some buzz out there in the blogosphere, a few directory listings perhaps, etc, etc, etc…  I’ll be sharing much of what I’ll be doing as part of the blog so stay tuned for the fun and excitement!

As of today the website purplewidget.com is NOT in the Google index.  Thus I have no ranking for the term purple widget and of course I have 0 pages indexed.

I have 0 inbound links to the site according to Link Diagnosis

None of this is surprising since I literally launched this website less than 48 hours ago.  Hopefully all of this will soon begin to change.

Stay tuned….

You’ll be learning much more in the very near future about PurpleWidget.com but for now it’s important to know the following:

It is 7:47pm CT (that’s 8:47pm ET for those that don’t realize anything exists outside the East coast) on September 29th, 2008 and I have JUST launch this blog dedicated to Purple Widgets.  

More coming soon….stay tuned!