I used the new tool and checked out my competition to see what keywords they ranked for and how much traffic they were getting a day for those keywords.
The list I want to focus on is below;
Professional Web Design
Web Design Company
Website designers
Website Development
Internet Web Site Design
Web Site Design
Web Design Firm
Graphic Design
Business website design
Web Design
Web Development
Ecommerce Web Design
Web Page Design
For the home page I decided to target 3 different keywords and they are Web Design, Graphic Design and Internet Web Site Design. I normally would not target 3 competitive keywords for one page but I feel I can get ranked for all three and getting links for different anchor text is always a good thing.
The next thing I’ll do is look at whose ranking for these keywords and what I need to do to beat them out for these keywords.
I’ve been working with my design company this week and have come to the conclusion that I want to get rid of some employees and go up on my prices. The idea behind it is that rather then try and do 100 websites at $550.00 a piece to make $5,500.00 per month cut the bills down around $3,000.00 and sale one website at $3,000.00. If we do 3 websites a month we only have to deal with 3 customers and the last two are total profit.
The benefit for the customer is that my whole office is dedicated to their project for the whole month and their time is not split between other clients. The problem with this is that I’ll have to market my business differently from the way I’ve been marketing it. At this time we get most our customers from forums and blogs.
My site has some pretty good rankings but no were near what I’ll need for a project like this one. I’ve put some thought into what would be the best keywords and search engines to rank on and have come to the conclusion that Google is not going to be the best search engine to rank on. I need traffic that will convert into to sales and I’m thinking that MSN is going to be the place to get that traffic.
I guess my first step is going to be figuring out how to make my site rank on MSN.
I’ve also been playing with some blogs and they don’t seem to rank as easily as I’d hoped so I’ll be creating pages for this project.
I’ve been playing with a new tool that allows me to check out the competitions websites and see how well they rank and I was disappointed in a lot of the so called experts and a lot of the blogs that I checked out.
But I’ll be using that tool to decide which keyword is the best one to rank my website homepage for. If anyone is interested in this project then I’m interested in everyones opinion on my website design, best search engines to rank on, how to rank on them, best ways to get traffic, my text (which will be changing as soon as I find my new keyword for the home page and how to rank on MSN) and anything else that might help out.
I’ll be posting everything I’m doing here as I do them as well as in my blog.
Guess it’s time to go to work.
I decided to do a little test now that my blog is optimized for the search engines. I wrote some text about custom website designs and I’m going to try and rank it for custom website design.
Here’s my thinking.
If the blog ranks well then I’m able to make a list of keywords and write articles about each of my keywords and rank those keywords in the top ten. But I guess step one is seeing how long it takes to rank my blog post in the top ten for custom website design.
I’ve decided to do a little search engine optimization on some of my blogs. I found a lot of information but very little information that told me where to go and what to do. Because of this I decided to start a list of some of the things I’ve done and how I went about doing them. The blog I’m using is WordPress.
If you log into WordPress and click on options, then click on Permalinks you will be taken to a page that allows you to change the way your url’s are shown. It’s best to do this in the beginning stages of starting your blog because once you change the way your url’s are shown, you will loose all incoming links going to your current pages.
You have three chooses, the first is the default setting, the second shows the date and title name and the third is a custom setting. I used the third and placed /%postname%/, this shows the title of my post in all the url’s and nothing else. I’m not sure if this was the best way, if I duplicate a post title I’m not sure what will happen. The second option might have been the better option but I did not want the dates in my url.
Next problem I saw was with the title of my pages, I downloaded the blog and went to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder and then picked the template I was using. From here I went to the header.php page and changed the title to only show the title of my post but later found a post by bj that had this code
So I changed it to this.
After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink, I’m still playing with this but it looks like a pretty neat tool. Lets say I want certain keywords to link to information about those keywords. I can tell the blog that every time it sees the keyword PageRank it needs to link to an article that explains PageRank.
I cheated a little and made it link to my website design site every time it sees the words website design but that does seem to be the most important site for someone looking for a website design company to me. (-:
I’m still playing but these are the changes I’ve made so far and I thought someone might be able to use this, so I posted it here.
I guess everyone has seen Wal-Mart’s new website for Christmas. If not let me explain a little. They have two elves Wally and Marty who show the kids some toys and the kids say yes or no to each toy being shown. If the kids say yes, the elves applaud but if the kid say no, the elves make comments about being out of a job.
Here are the problems that I see with the site.
1. There is no branding for Wal-Mart, other than the elves names.
2. They try and make the kids think it’s there job to support the elves.
3. They use this as a means to send spam mail to parents.
4. The kids do not get to pick the toys, Wal-Mart decides which toys will be shown and in which order.
On the social media side I see it as a plus because they are getting talked about in a lot of places, none of it has been good but the site is getting traffic from all the bad press. I even let my daughter play with the site a little and she enjoyed it. I also got to see some toys that I did not know about and would have never seen if it had not been for the bad press Wal-Mart is getting from this site.
I guess the question is rather or not it will increase sales and rather or not the spam emails will hurt Wal-Mart.
