I got pretty creative with the yellow polka dot background. I was hoping to find something that would work on Google Images but I couldn’t find a good match. I ended up using a logo creator and overlaying the dot patterns onto the background. If you look closely you can see that they are all a little bit different as far as position and spacing. It worked out fine, however, as you would really have to be looking to see it. The ice cream shop is called Shirleys Frozen Custard, but I decided to build the site on floridakeysicecreamshop.com to gain a little SEO value. I pointed the Shirleys Frozen Custard URL to the Florida Keys Ice Cream Shop site. Go and check it out if you get a chance. I still have to input the info for a couple of the menu pages but other than that it is close to finished.

In building the site I decided to use the WordPress Twenty Ten theme. This is about as simple as it gets. I added a Contact page, a Services page, and a new Home page. I used the existing About page and added some content about the company. I set the site as a static website, and installed the new Home page. I did a Google search for images about electricians at found three that I thought would work nicely. I took one of them and designed a new header and uploaded it to the site. I took the second image and made a nice Contact widget for the sidebar. I took the third image and used it to fill out the home page and linked it to the Services page.

I spent more time than I should have tinkering with the code to make the nav bar appear to light up when you went to click on a page. I thought this would be a nice touch for an electricians website. This would have probably gone a lot faster if it hadn’t been really late at night while I was tinkering. So, here is the new site for Florida Keys Electrical Contractors:

After watching the video, it looks to me like the hyphen in the domain name is not an issue, so it is a good time to run an experiment and see which type of site works best. I will be careful to build the sites on the same theme and point the same number of links at each site. I will also put the same amount of content on each site (not duplicate content), and I will link to both sites as Miami Skydiving and Skydiving Miami. If the site with the hyphen works for SEO, this will be very helpful when there are not good domain names available for building new sites in competitive keyword areas. I will be building these sites over the next few weeks and will start monitoring their progress. When I have some initial data I will post it here on Blog Consulting.

The Thesis theme is recommended by a lot of blogging SEO types. I had read about the theme some time ago but never had the occasion to use it before, but with this new project it looked like it would be a perfect fit. So, after reading all the great reviews I purchased the developers version of the theme and got to work. At first, the theme made me feel really stupid. I have been working with Wordpress themes for quite a while and feel very confident when it comes to customizing them to get them to look and act the way I want them to. Thesis has a whole different way of doing things and it was a little overwhelming initially. I kept plugging away at it and over a couple of days it started to make sense. I could see why so many people had given the theme such high praise. I used the theme to build a skydiving website for Skydive Florida Keys. Here is what the Skydive Florida Keys website looks like with the Thesis Wordpress theme in place:

If you have a couple of minutes you should go and see the site in action. It has a nice slideshow running in the middle of the themes that introduces all of the Page options on the site. It also has a nice peel away in the top right corner which opens up encourage people to make a reservation. As far as Thesis goes, I believe it will become my go to Wordpress Theme, but I would suggest that blogging newbies start with some of the other themes that are available. Thesis is awesome, but it does require some previous experience to get it set up. The Thesis people do have an excellent support forum and I got responses to both of my big questions in less than twenty four hours.

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 always get a little wave of nostalgia when I see the default Wordpress theme on a brand new site. It is a whole new beginning and I am looking forward to see how the site ends up. What I will be doing on this site is installing some plugins and a new theme. I will then gather some Bio’s and pictures of individual members of the band to put on a page called Bio’s. Then I will add a video page and get a nice video site to work with, either YouTube or Vimeo. I have been using Vimeo primarily because they allow larger video files than YouTube. I will then suggest that the band starts a FaceBook page and I will connect the two so that every time an article is published it will also show up on Facebook. Since a band needs to really work the whole Social Network thing, I will also suggest a Twitter account and I will connect the blog to the Twitter Account so that when the band tweets it will show up on the blog. I will also install a nice little podcast player where the band can post some of their songs and people can either play them on the site or download them into their Ipod or Iphone. I will also be putting up some sort of calender to allow the band to post their schedule so that their fans can see where they are playing.

Underneath all of that, I will lay the SEO foundation for the site so that it will show up for keyword searches for bands in the Florida Keys, bands for hire in the Florida Keys, Florida Keys local bands, etc. Once that is done, the giants of Reachnor should be good to go! Check out the site at www.thebandreach.com and see how this Optimizer Man Adventure in SEO ended up.

I also did a check on what the traffic to the site has been over the last week:

In eighteen days the site came from no where and moved to the number 1 Google return. It is very likely that this is temporary, but it is a good sign that over time the site can become the number one return for that search. Our hope from the beginning was to have the site be the number one return for the Google search cool inventions. The site has been showing up in position five for that search. but over time it should be able to work its way up to number one. What it is left for the Cool New Inventions site? We have to build links and add content. One of the ways we will build links is to use article marketing. For our article marketing campaign we will start by writing five articles over the next couple of months that we will distribute for publication on the Internet. I use a service for this provided by Distribute Your Articles. Once I write an article, I submit it to Distribute Your Articles, they check it out for any problems it might have, and they in turn submit the article to hundreds of sites around the Internet. As each of these sites publishes the article, our site gets two links. The potential is for each of these articles to produce hundreds of links for the site. What about duplicate content? I am careful not to post the articles I use for article marketing on my own sites, so any problems that might happen with duplicate content are not my problems. Duplicate content would be an issue for the sites who publish the articles to deal with, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue for those types of sites.

I will continue to add content to the site over the next couple of months to see if I can secure the number one spot on Google for all of our intended keywords. The process that we have followed is the process that many people try and use to make money on the Internet. If you can get the right keyword that pays enough money per click and develop a strong flow of traffic then you could potentially make some money. If you had a bunch of sites like that, you could potentially make a living. The people making the most money are the ones that are selling this information to people who are looking to make money. You, however, found the information for free here on Blog Consulting.

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.

You want to add the custom permalink structure that is shown on the screen and then click save changes. With that done, I add some plugins. The free plugins that are available for Wordpress are one of its finest options. You can find a plugin to make your blog do almost anything. Installing Wordpress plugins is also very easy now. Just go to the Plugins tab on the dashboard and click on Add New. You can search for the plugins you want and then just click to have them installed and activated. There are two plugins that come with the initial install. You want to activate the Akismet plugin which is a great spam blocker. You will need to go and get a Worpress API key, which is not difficult if you follow the directions that are provided by the plugin to do that. I also add a plugin for keeping track of my blog statistics, a plugin for my contact page, a plugin that automatically upgrades Wordpress when they put out a new version, a plugin that automatically backups my blog and sends the information to my email account, and a plugin that will help with the SEO of the site.

I also add a few pages right away. I put up a Privacy Policy page, a Terms and Conditions page, and a Contact page. On each of these pages I put a link back to the homepage. These initial links will help your site get indexed by Google. The Cool New Inventions site was indexed in less than 24 hours because of these links and the link I sent to it from one of the articles in this Free Blog Consulting Series. When I entered Cool New Inventions into the Google search engine I saw the new site listed:

It is showing up on page 1 in position 9. It won’t stay there, but I know from my statistics that I did get two visitors to the site from people searching for Cool New Inventions on Google. With my new Pages in place I am going to install a WordPress theme to change the look of the site. I am going to use a theme from Solopress because they are easy to work with and I don’t want to spend a lot of time having to tweak the theme.

With the plugins and theme installed I need to write some articles for the site. Fortunately, the topic of the site lends itself to writing some interesting articles. I will start the blog by writing and posting five articles. The I need to build some links. We will talk about link building in the next article in the series.