Position 229 stinks. That is a drop of 226 positions. It is really not great considering keeping websites on page 1 of Google is what I get paid to do. What about Yahoo and Bing?

Number three on Yahoo and number one on Bing. So what happened to Google? Here is what I think happened. I had a little lull in business about two months ago so I took the time and spent it on my own badly neglected blog (it is like an electrician who never changes a light bulb because they are too busy fixing stuff for everyone else). I wrote new articles, updated the site, did some article marketing, commented on some peers blogs and in a very short time my links shot up from 2000 to 7000. They were all good links, but it was a little too many a little too fast. So, somewhere in the Google algorithm, Google says, “we better pull that site out and make sure it is legitimate”. Since all of the links were good, the site will come back in the near future. In the meantime, I have gotten real busy again (look for new Optimizer Man adventures with Structural Engineering Services, Florida Keys Homes for Sale, Skydiving in Florida, and Miami Skydiving), so it will give the site a chance to move back to page one. What does this mean to you? Don’t freak out if your site moves off of page 1 for a season. As long as you are using solid SEO practices it will find its way back.

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:

It is also showing up in position 9 on page 1 for a Google search of cool inventions:

These search results are temporary but they are providing us with a few visitors everyday. No one has actually clicked on an Adsense link on the site yet, but the site is still really new. I did post the first article on the site and made the post page the front page of the site. The temporary front page that was on the site, (which I wrote about in part 6 of this series) is now just a useful information filler page on the site. As we continue building links we should slowly see our traffic increase. The other thing that often happens to a new site like this is that it will spend some time in the Google sandbox. It is not uncommon for new sites to just disappear for a while from the search results. Sometimes it is for a few days, some times for a few week, sometimes for a few months, and then one day, its back. If your new site gets sandboxed, don’t worry. Take advantage of the time to write articles and build links so that when the site comes out of the sandbox it moves quickly forward in position on Google. Here is a snapshot of the traffic that the Cool New Inventions site received over the last week (the sites second week in existence):

Today (Thursday) the site has had 26 unique visitors. Not a landslide but a good start for a new site.

As a temporary solution, we are going to take advantage of some short cuts available to us on the Internet. The first thing I will add are some on topic news feed videos. There is a service called The Voxant News Room that will provide you with an embed code for different news streams. They have a science and technology news feed that will work well on the Cool New Inventions site. I will create a page called Science and Technology and paste the embed code there. I will then temporarily set this new page as the default page for the site. Once I start writing articles I will change the front page back to showing the articles. I am also going to grab a video news feed about technology press releases and put it in the right sidebar. This news video service could actually provide you with a little income if you had a lot of people watch the videos. For most sites, you will never see any income from Voxant but it is a great page filler.

I am also going to take advantage of an RSS feed from another site about new inventions. I will take the RSS feed and put it in the left sidebar. With the videos and the RSS feed in place, I am providing useful information to anyone who visits the site. I am also able to place Google Adesnse ads on the site. I am allowed to have three different Google ads on one page. I am going to put a 468 x 60 image ad up in the right side of the header, a 300 x 250 text ad at the top of the right sidebar, and a 120 x 600 text ad at the top of the left sidebar. Take some time with your Adsense text ads to get them to color match the rest of your site. You want them to be visible but you don’t want them to look like they don’t belong there. Our hope is that visitors will click on the ads when they visit the site. You can’t ask people to click on the ads on your site as that is a violation of your agreement with Google, so you need to try and place your ads in such a way that people are drawn to them naturally. There is a lot of information on the Internet about how to work with Adsense, but if you get frustrated you might want to hire me for a little blog consulting on how the process works.

These additions to the site took about 20 minutes, and you can see that our new site has taken on the look of a well established site:

Now that there is some information on the site I can begin working on the initial link building. In a few weeks I will start working on the articles for the site. When I do I will write another article here about article marketing.

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.

For our project we chose the domain name Alternative Energy Information (www.alternativeenergyinformation.net) which we have now set up and we have added the nine sub-domains, which gives us the ten websites for ten dollars a year. We have to set up each of the nine sub-domain sites so that they are functional. This requires installing WordPress, adding a theme, and adding content. We have finished setting up the first sub-domain site, Renewable Alternative Energy. We added five public domain articles to the site (using the public domain articles is handy because it is quick, but it has some drawbacks, namely, the articles don’t help us with our search engine optimization), we added Google Adsense (there is virtually no traffic to the sites right now so the Adsense isn’t effective, but if one person makes it to the site and clicks on a link, it could pay for the site for the year), and we also added some affiliate programs to the site which provide additional information and also another possible revenue stream.

We will repeat the process for each of the other eight sites, finding content and affiliate programs that fit the site. Then we let the sites kind of simmer a while so that the search engines can begin to relate to them. We will add an article or two a month, and we will begin the link building process. We will talk more about these three components (time, content, links) in future articles in this blog consulting series.

I had hoped to demonstrate how quickly the ten sen sites could be put up but I got busy with some other blog consulting work. Each site requires about two hours to reach the set up stage, this includes all the preliminary set up with the web host. I am hoping to have all the sites up by the end of May, 2009.