Purple Widget – An SEO Experiment

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!