Purple Widget – An SEO Experiment

This question was recently posed to me:
If I were to ask you the question “What drives SEO success”, not specific to any client, and I was a CEO, how would you answer me?
Here’s my response:
If you steal it, at least give me some credit
SEO success is driven by several factors that evolve over [...]

I’ve said it before – heck, I say it often.  Fresh content is needed to help drive SEO success.  But how true is it?
I haven’t updated this site in over 4 months, and before that there was a rather long content drought as well.  Yet, as of today this site remains in the #1 and [...]

This is not likely the last (maybe not the first) off the wall post.  Afterall, without a sense of humor life can kind of suck sometimes.
There is a lot of talk about links (aka “inbound links”) and link building in the world of search marketing and when talking SEO.  I’ll skip the commentary and common [...]

Although Purple Widget still ranks #1 on Google for the search term “purple widget” and #19 for “SEO Experiment” as well as #16 (with no extra SEO effort for that page specifically yet) for “green widget” I admit I’ve been a bit lax on keeping fresh new content on this site.  As I’ve pointed out [...]

What happens when your SEO finally starts to work?
You’ve been creating great content and fresh content for several months now.  You’ve been building links and all your page titles are keyword research driven and page focused.  And maybe you’ve seen some small increases in traffic and better rankings.  But are you ready when your SEO [...]

I haven’t checked it everyday but less than 3 weeks after putting up a single page with an optimized page title, file name and content my PAGE (not site) dedicated to Green Widgets ranks #6 on Google for the search term ‘Green Widget’!
So just that quickly a page specifically designed to rank for a keyword [...]

As an SEO Specialist dealing with clients I have often said “there is no magic bullet for SEO” and then go on to explain that as many as 200 individual factors determine where you may rank for any given search, that those factors change often in both what they actually are and how important any [...]

Maybe I should be paying closer attention to the road when I drive but seeing a common irritant once again this morning as I completed the final 1/4 mile of my drive to the office put another SEO analogy in my head and how could I resist putting it on Purple Widget.
First, what happens at [...]

Of course this site, Purple Widget, is sort of an SEO case study in itself but I have a specific example of an e-commerce site I’ve done work on that is finally starting to pay off.
The site started from the ground up – new domain name and all in the fall of 2007.  It’s built [...]

I thought I’d vary the subject matter just a bit today.  There will be some SEO ties but the main subject is really more of a marketing, brand management concern than anything else.
Recently, and perhaps with more to come in the future in the face of global economic concerns I’ve gotten (or seen) e-mails from [...]