As the third term in my test of lotusjump software, here is the benchmark results for “fort wayne ecommerce”:

AOL: not found 
GOOGLE: not found 
LYCOS: not found
YAHOO: not found
MSN: not found 
NETSCAPE: not found 

again, lots of room to grow here….

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I’ve just started working with LOTUSJUMP (http://www.lotusjump.com) for SEO.  Here is a screenshot of my first look at what it suggests I do for Optimization.

By the way - on the previous post - forgot to include my third SEO term:

3.  Fort Wayne eCommerce

OK, here’s the screenshot:

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

As you have probably read from my recent posts, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently trying to optimize my own website recently.  

I’ve been doing OK on my own, and now thought I would give a new tool a chance.

The new tool is put out by a company called LotusJump (http://www.lotusjump.com).  The trial has two basic purposes: 

1.  See if I can improve my own SEO

2.  Evaluate the value of the service provided by LotusJump

So, here’s the three words I have currently in the lotusjump SEO:

1.  Fort Wayne Web Design - which gets about 210 monthly searches

2. Custom Web Development - which gets about 2,900 monthly searches

Here are my current page results for each:

For “Fort Wayne Web Design”:

AOL: page 2 - #11
GOOGLE: page 2 - #11
LYCOS: not found
YAHOO: not found
MSN: page 1 - #8
NETSCAPE: page 2 - #11

For “Custom Web Development”:

AOL: not found 
GOOGLE: not found 
LYCOS: not found
YAHOO: not found
MSN: not found 
NETSCAPE: not found 

So, I’ve got plenty of room for the second term, also a little bit of room for improvement on my first.

I’m going to try it for 30 days and give you the result.  Consider it a running test…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I’ve been using a tool by Market Leap (marketleap.com) to help me evaluate where my site is on various search engines.

Using the search term “Fort Wayne Website Design”, here’s what I’ve found:

AOL Search: 9 (page 1)
Google Search: 9 (page 1)
Lycos Search: 1 (page 1 - obviously)
MSN Search: 2 (page 1 - again obviously)
Netscape Search: 9 (page 1)
Yahoo Search: 1 (again, still page 1)

So, I feel pretty good about the results.  I’m still wondering why I can’t seem to creep into the top results for Google Local (which appear at the top of the page when using Fort Wayne Website Design as the search term).

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

If you look back at “take 2″ and “take 1″ - you can see how I have done at getting google traffic.  Now that I am feeling better about my ranking on key terms, I decided it was time to look at my referring trafic again.

Here is a brief screenshot from Google Analytics:

You can see that now the traffic (albeit is pretty small) that is being referred from Google is much more “on target”.  Now I am seeing terms like “website design fort wayne”, and “eh design” and “fort wayne web design”.  These terms, obivously, are much more on track with what I want.

A couple of weird things - 

Of course, it is Google - 

When I search for “fort wayne web design” in Google - designedbyeh.com comes up at #9.  But, when I search for “web design fort wayne”, designedbyeh.com comes up at #11 (page 2!).  

The only real problem with following 2 numbers is that that moves me from page 1 to page 2 - a big deal.

Also, I still have to figure out how to appear in the top 10 in local results.  Let me know if you have any ideas.

Finally - it’s also obvious that the SEO is starting to make a difference. Here’s a chart from the wp-stats:

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

OK, if you have been reading my posts at all, I have finally cracked into page number 1 on Google!

My keyword / search phrase is “Fort Wayne Website Design”.  And my current results are:

Google: #7
MSN: #1
Yahoo: #1

 So, that seems like a pretty good results.  I’ll be watching my blog stats (I’m using both Google analytics and WP-Stats) to see if this means any more traffic.

Questions and issues that remain to be solved:

1.  Why don’t I appear in the top 10 LOCAL results in Google?
2.  Why do I appear #1 in Yahoo and MSN, but only #7 in Google - I need Google to be Top 5
3.  Is this a good search term?  Should I optimize for something better?  Should I “ADD” another option - i.e. try to stay #1 on the current term (”Fort Wayne Website Design”), but add another term?

So, I’ll be watching, reading data, and asking questions over the next month to see what the answers are.  Keep reading, I’ll have answers in the future.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I just read a great blog post over at Occam’s Razor - the blog by Avinash Kaushik - analytics evangelist for Google.

The post goes on about the three kinds of innovation: incremental, incremental with side effects, and transformational.  

It’s a great read.  Check it out:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/redefining-innovation-incremental-side-effect-transformational.html

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

So, as you can see from my earlier post (/web-site-design/seo-and-optimization/) I’ve been trying to play the SEO game recently.

I have had some success: currently I am listed as numbers 2 and 3 on Yahoo, number 4 on MSN (hey I moved up 1 place) and number 17 on Google (that means page 2).  Not really sure why I’m so much farther down on Google than on the other sites.  But, I’m still working on it.

Lately I’ve been trying to pay even more attention to the whole <title> tag deal.  I’m using (along with 80 billion or so other folks), the All-In-One SEO pack plugin to re-write all the titles and all the meta stuff.  I’ve had to tweak and play with it a bit, but I think (emphasis on think), I have struck a good balance between human readable - friendly title and ones that include all my keywords.  

What are my keywords?  Still the same: Fort Wayne Website Design.

I’d like to appear #1 for that term on Yahoo, MSN, and Google.  Then I would feel like I have made some progress…

What is interesting is to look at how my site has started to shift lately.

If you look at the month of September, here is some of the searches I appeared in the Top 20:

Notice that terms like “Fort Wayne Analytics”, “Free Survey” and others were making the top list.

Now look at the first two weeks in October: 

Now, I see terms like “eh design” and other variants like that starting to move there way up into the list.  I suppose that is a good thing.  I’m not sure.

It still doesn’t have Fort Wayne Website Design in the list.  But, this could also be a result of just a poorly chosen term.  Nobody is searching for that, perhaps.

More later.  For now, back to work.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I just checked out this site:  http://www.websitegrader.com/.  It talk about the health of your site and things that you should do to improve you Search Engine Ranking.  I found about 3 or 4 things.  Here is what was suggested for my site:

1. Meta Description too long - my description tag was 230 characters and the recommended is 150.
2. Meta Keywords - the site said I had a high number of meta keywords.  And, while this is only marginally important to Search Engines, they still suggest reducing the number to just the key few.
3. Domain Registration - it suggested I renew my domain for several years - as a 1 year domain is often a spam domain. 

So, I’m going to change all three and see what happens.  Right now I am number 22 on Google for “website design fort wayne”.  Will changing any of these help?  We’ll see.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

As some of you know, about two weeks ago, I was out in San Francisco, CA for the 2008 JMP Innovator’s Conference.  While their, we had the chance to sit down and talk with Avinash Kaushik - Analytics Evangelist (what a cool title) for Google.  

I’m working on the video right now.  But, here’s a short sample with a bunch of great, great thoughts.  Enjoy!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites