Purple Widget – An SEO Experiment

And now, less than a week from launch this website is ranking for the term purple widget.  I see us ranking 4th in Google (which is realistically the only engine that matters)!

Purple Widget - Ranked 4th on Google

Sorry about the small image – still learning WordPress.  Click to view bigger!

Although Google is king, lets see how we’re doing elsewhere in just one weeks time:

Live.com – Not in top 50 – but that would be because we aren’t yet indexed by MSN Live Search

Yahoo! – Also not yet indexed.

It won’t be long, I need to create accounts on each sites equivelant to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure they know about us.  I may wait to do this in the interest of seeing how long it takes to appear without this step.

No resting on our # 4 ranking!  We’ll continue to work to not only maintain the ranking but to move up a bit.  I will likely lay low for a while on doing much in the interest of seeing what happens and explore a common scenario that sites report – spiking early with a ranking but them falling down significantly before working slowly back up to again rank high.  We’ll watch for a while and see what happens.

So in less than a week, purplewidget.com goes from nothing more than a recently registered domain name to the #4 search result on the #1 (by far) search engine.  Focused content specific to the targeted keyword is all it took.  The domain name doesn’t hurt either….I’ll explore that more in the future.  But what will it take to move up 3 more spots – and stay there?  We’ll find out in due time.  So that’s the good news – the bad news remains that the search term ‘purple widget’ provides no real value or traffic – but that’s my point.

Interesting happenings the past few days.  On Oct 3rd I reported that Google had all 16 of our pages indexed, a few days later they had just 1 and now they have 4.  Odd.  I’ll continue to monitor our indexing.

Randfish a very well known name in the SEO world, has written an article at his site SEOmoz that talks about what my site, Purple Widget is exploring.  How long does it take to get ranked?  Bottom line, it takes time.  He points about that you can get ranked more quickly for less meaningful term – such as purple widget (although he doesn’t use that example) but for terms with value that might actually drive traffic, it takes time.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/headsmacking-tip-8-give-your-seo-campaigns-time-to-take-effect

The entire Purple Widget website is now indexed in Google:

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.

Purple Widgets is now LIVE in the Google index!  Only 1 page, but we’re there!  This isn’t a revelation by any means but still nice to see, took less than 3 full days:

Pages from your site are included in Google’s index. See Index stats.

Ironically it’s not the home page.  But that will change soon:

First Link to Purple Widget | Purple Widget – An SEO Experiment

Still haven’t been indexed by Google, no surprise – it’s still only day 3.  But I do nearly have a Facebook Fan Page ready for Purple Widgets but it’s not yet live so there are no links to Purple Widget on the web….until now!

I have posted a cute little celebrity video about voting on my personal blog Scotts2Cents.com and put a link back to here on that blog post.  So there is an indexed site out there in the world linking here now!  For those of you that just came from Scotts 2 Cents don’t worry you are not caught in some kind of black hole in the space time continuium.  The Internet as you know it still exists.  So register to vote.

I’ve taken a step toward getting “seen” on the web.  A sitemap.xml file has been submitted to Ask, MSN and Google.  I used a WordPress plugin to automate this process for me.

I’m glad you asked.  As you can see by the title this site is an SEO experiment.  So that clears it up – right.  Thanks for stopping by.

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….

Now that I’ve been live for a day and a half I figured I should get Google Analytics installed, as any SEO will tell you – you must have analytics on a website or you have no idea how and why people are getting to your website.  Nobody is really visiting this site so it really doesn’t matter yet but soon I hope that might change.

I also installed All-In-One SEO for WordPress.  WordPress by default is pretty search engine friendly, as our blogs in general, but this plugin provides a bit more flexibility and different options for optimizing a blog for search engine success.

So I still haven’t explained what this site is for and why it’s here.  Don’t worry, it’s coming….coming soon….

I’ve been thinkg about it and talking about for a long time now and finally – I’m live!

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!