Purple Widget – An SEO Experiment

So back in September of 2008 I started this silly little website to make a point.  To illustrate a line, that as an SEO professional, I’ve used many times when talking to clients.  If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1000 times – “I can rank your website #1 on Google for ‘Purple Widget’ but if nobody searches for ‘Purple Widget’ it does you no good.” 

An overstated way of saying that ranking well in Google isn’t always the best strategy and measuring only rankings when talking about SEO just doesn’t make sense.  It’s a factor, yes – but use analytics, use indexing, use links to get a strong overall picture in regards to search engine optimization.  And for the love of all that is holy please use the right keywords!  In other words don’t optimize for a term nobody is searching for!  Like purple widget or green widget.

Green widget you say??  Yes, I do say.  Hey, that’s the title of this page of your blog.  Is that just a coinicidence?  No, it’s not…the SEO experiment continues…..

As I said, I was out to prove a point with PurpleWidget.com and I proved the point pretty quickly.  It didn’t take long to build a website from scratch and rank #1 on Google.  But it was for a worthless term so big deal.  Big deal indeed – and it was extra easy since the domain is www.purplewidget.com.  So can I further emphasize my point that ranking #1 on Google doesn’t matter much if it’s not for the right term by also gaining a top ranking for ‘Green Widget’ with only supporting content?  This page is pretty heavily focused on green widgets – in fact that’s really all it talks about and is only borderline spammy.  I think I’ve stayed under the spamdar for the term green widget so far….

I could probably use some images and such about green widgets but for now I’ve got a page title and some keyword rich marginally written text to rely on.  I’ll work on a few links with good anchor text in the next few weeks and we’ll see what happens.

Thanks and Happy Green Widgets!