It needed more than a Florida Keys Facial. It needed a Florida Keys Facelift. So I went to work. I thought that this would be a good project for you to see how I tackle a project like this so I recorded all my actions in a series of articles. If you are interested in how the Optimizer Man performed the Florida Keys Facelift on the Florida Keys Facial site, check out the following articles:

A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 1
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 2
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 3
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 4
A New Business Blog Consulting Client Part 5

If you don’t have time to read through the articles, here is what the face lift accomplished:

I started out by doing some extensive keyword research. I was looking for keywords that would generate some traffic, and also be within our reach in a short period of time. All of the major keyword phrases encompassing fish farms and fish farming are highly competitive and already well represented by websites with high page ranks. I eventually settled on a keyword phrase that received about 1000 exact requests on Google every month and that I believed we could compete in within a few months of getting started. The keyword phrase I selected was Aquaculture Tanks.

My next step was to purchase a suitable domain name and I found that www.aquaculturetanks.net was available, so we purchased it. I then hosted the website (we used Good News Domains for both purchasing the domain name and hosting) and installed WordPress. Since the old website would not be helpful in our online marketing strategies, we simply pointed the old domain name (in case people still used it from old literature, etc.) at the new site.

I added a theme that would allow us to build an attractive site and provide information about aquaculture farming and the services our client can provide. The theme that we are using is in effect a blog, but I set up the blog with a static front page which gives it the appearance of a more traditional website. Here is a look at the final product:

Here is a look at the Google ranking after one month:

Here is a look at the traffic generated over the last six months:

There are a lot of things to consider with regards to the competition, but primarily I am looking at page rank, number of links, and what the actual domain name of the sites are. Of the top three results, only one of them actually has the word invention in their domain, and none of the sites has a page rank greater than 3. I think we that over time we can be competitive so lets see what domain names are available. For this I will use a tool on www.goodnewsdomains.com:

I type in the domain name I would like to get which would be coolinventions.com. In a perfect world it would be available and I would buy it on the spot. It is not a perfect world and here is the result of my search:

It is not available. So, now I have to get creative. While I was looking at the competition I noticed that one of the sites was getting a lot of traffic from the keyword “new inventions”. I did a little extra keyword research with the Google tool and discovered that it would also be a good keyword phrase to pursue. Of course, newinventions.com isn’t available either. So i decided to check on coolnewinventions.com.

Even though coolnewinventions.com isn’t available (somebody bought it and has it parked, probably trying to sell it for an inflated price) coolnewinventions.net is available. While I have had some success with domain name extensions other than .com and .net (like .biz and .info), in this case I would recommend sticking with .com and .net. The .net was available and I bought it. Purchasing the domain name is as easy as following the instructions as you are prompted by Good News Domains. Don’t buy anything extra, all you need is the domain name. I paid $12.17 for the .net which is good for one year. The next thing we need to do is get a web host. We will do that in part 3.

Let’s start by doing a little keyword research on the potential topic of our site. I was thinking that there might be some interest in a blog about green inventions since everyone is all about being green these days. I will use the Google Keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to find the information I am looking for to see if the site will be able to generate any traffic from the search engines.

Go to the Google keyword tool and type in the captcha code that you are presented with. Once you are in, there is a place on the upper right side of the page that says “previous interface”. I still use the previous interface because I am used to it. I am sure you can do the same thing with the new interface. Now type in the keyword phrase you want to search for, in my case green inventions. The result will look something like this: (click on the image to get a larger view)

We need to change a couple of settings on the Keyword tool to get more accurate information. First, you need to change the Match Type from broad to exact. Secondly, you need to gp to the choose columns to hide/display and select Show Estimated Avg. CPC. The result will look something like this: (click on the image to get a larger view)

Two things I can see right away from this information. First, 720 global visitors with no data available for local search volume means that there isn’t enough traffic. Second, the .05 average CPC means that the site will not generate any money from Google Adsense. So, I need to look for something that is a little more attractive. By scrolling down the page and looking at additional keywords to consider I might find a workable alternative. I would like a keyword phrase that gets good traffic and has a reasonable Average. CPC. Of course, that is what everyone wants. As I scroll down the page I find one keyword that I think we will work with. There are some other more attractive keywords but they already have a lot of competition and for the sake of this exercise I want to use a keyword that we can get ranked fairly simply. The keyword that I will use for this series of articles is “cool inventions”. Check it out on the keyword tool with the exact match and Avg. CPC still selected: (click on the image to get a larger view)

This information tells me that “cool inventions” gets 9900 searches a month in the United States (my local search) and that advertisers are bidding 1.73 to place their ads for that keyword phrase. Does that mean that I can get 9900 times $1.73 every month for my site? Wouldn’t that be great? Unfortunately, the reality is not even close. First, we have to be able to get our site ranked number 1 on Google. Coming in second or third will get some traffic but not as much. First position should get you about 40% of that 9900, or 3960 visitors a month. Of that number only about 2 % will actually click on an ad on your site, so you might get 80 clicks a month. You don’t get all of the $1.73 either. Google gets a bunch of it and not all of the ads on your site will be worth that much, so you might get about fifty cents per click on average. So, 80 clicks at fifty cents would get you about $40 dollars a month. There might be some affiliate marketing money that can be made for this keyword phrase but that will have to be seen. Normally, I would say that a $40 a month return is not really enough to justify the work and cost involved but for this series of articles it should be an interesting exercise. The next thing to do is check out the competition. We will do that in Part 2.

Getting Wordpress installed was a very easy process. Once I had the clients username and password to the cpanel of her hosting service I was able to go in and delete her existing site and then install Wordpress. Deleting the site was as easy as quickly learning the cpanel, selecting all the files in the folder, and hitting delete. The Wordpress install required adding informaton in a few fields and then the host installed it in less than a minute.

After about fifteen minutes of research I decided to use a theme from Solostream. I have used a lot of different Wordpress themes on a lot of different blogs. There are some great free themes available for Wordpress and I have used quite a few of them in the past. I have also purchased themes from IThemes and Solostream. The Solostream sites have a very user friendly interface that makes putting a blog together go very quickly. When you use a free theme, it takes a little while longer to figure out exactly what the person who designed it was up to. I also usually have to make a lot of changes in the code to get it to do what I want. With the Solostream theme, most people would not need to make any changes. I have made a few adaptations for this site so far, including removing the comments and author and date information from the blog posts so that the site will end up looking more like a website than a blog. I liked the glider that was built into this particular theme and think that it will work well for the project.

I added the theme, some plugins, and some pictures to get the new site started. Then I spoke with the client to make sure they were OK with the new look. The new site is a long way from being finished, but here is what the site looks like today:

Our next step is to do some keyword research and see what kind of traffic may be available for this site.

Good content is one of the most important factors for a healthy blog. If you don’t write regular articles with some useful information in them, your blog will tend to be lethargic and not respond very well with the search engines.

Good links are developed mostly by a lot of hard work. There are a lot of shortcuts available, but they usually result in getting links that are subject to penalties from Google. One of the methods I use for link building is article marketing. Write some original articles on topics related to your blog and then publish them on various sites on the web. You can usually get at least two links back to your site every time the article is published. Using a service like Ezine makes the publishing process easy and you can often have one article published hundreds of times resulting in hundreds of links to your site.

Time is the one element that makes most people give up before they see their blog get really healthy. When I introduce the time element to my clients, they often think that things should happen much faster. Depending on how competitive a keyword is, the more time it takes to get ranked.

Now, granted, Blog Consulting is showing up at the very bottom of page 1, but it is on the page. Why does it even mater? A page one return is the desired result for SEO efforts. The blogs and bloggers who sites show up on page one are an amazing group of blog consultants. I often read their blogs and I know what kind of work they are producing. Just to show up on the same page is what we consider a “happening”. When you work on a blog or website and finally see some Google recognition, it is a very satisfying feeling.

There is an extremely strong possibility that the slide will slide back to page 2 or 3 and then move forward again. Over time I hope to see this Blog Consulting site stay on Page 1 and hopefully move up somewhere in the top three for the keyword phrase “blog Consulting” and “Blog Consultant”. We will keep working and watching!

We need to get a domain name to get things started.  This is what we are going to spend the ten dollars on.  We are going to do our domain name research at Good News Domains, and then we will purchase the domain name (with tax the domain name will actually cost 10.19, so I rounded down for the title of the series).  Good News Domains will then provide us with free hosting for our ten websites.  We will set the main one up with the domain name we purchased, and then we will set up the others as sub-domains with the keywords we researched earlier.

Alternative energy is very competitive and so we had to get creative to get a domain name that would work.  We finally decided on and purchased Alternative Energy Information (www.alternativeenergyinformation.net).  We will set this site up with the free linux hosting provided by Good News domains.  The next step will be to set up the sub-domain sites.  This method will work fine as we are going to be expecting the search engines to bring traffic to our sites.   Over the next couple of week we will be getting the following sites going.

Renewable Alternative Energy

Future Alternative Energy

etf Alternative Energy

Mutual Fund Alternative Energy

Business Alternative Energy

Alternative Energy Funds

Alternative Energy Investments

Alternative Energy Stocks

Alternative Energy Sources

Getting these sites started will require us to create MYSQL databases and then installing Wordpress for each of the sites.  This process is really fairly easy once you get used to it.  It requires some knowledge of how to use FTP (file transfer protocol), and how to unzip files.  Good News  Domains provides an FTP program or you can use Firezilla or any other FTP program you are comfortable with. We will continue this blog consulting series of articles after we get the sites up and running.

Another strategy is to think about other things that people might search for to bring them to your site. For example, if someone needed help with their blog, they may not know to search for a blog consultant. They may however simply type in to a Google search “I need help with my blog”. In order to potentially capitalize on this, I wrote a series of articles called “I Need Help With My Blog”. If you were to do a Google search for that string of words today, this is what comes up:

This site shows up on Page 1 in position 10. Any time you can get your site as a page 1 return on Google it will increase your traffic flow. I am writing these articles called “How Do I Get Traffic to My Blog” with the same idea. A google search with these keywords gives the following result:

This return is currently in the middle of page 3. Over time there is the possibility that the position will improve. Each time we start a new series of articles it will be with the idea of attracting visitors to the site. This is a strategy you might want to consider for your own blog.