Recently I had the opportunity to talk with a high-end custom home builder in the Seattle area regarding his company’s web presence. He’s paying a local SEO company ‘a lot of money’ (in his words) to get his site optimized and hopefully on page one of Google search for certain key words. He said that so far they were concentrating on optimizing his site (not necessarily on engaging with others online). And maybe optimizing the site is all they promised to do. But one thing he told me alarmed me. ”They’ve done their site optimization, now they’re waiting for Google to come back and scan the site again so they can plan their next optimization tweak. It’s been a couple months and I’m anxious to see results…”
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not making a judgement about the SEO company. I’m not privy to what they have promised to their client. I was, however, frustrated with this idea that someone would have to wait so long for Google to scan their site.
I just had to do an experiment to prove that I could get Google’s attention in a day or so.
Here’s what I did.
Step 1. I wrote two short and simple posts on my personal Tumblr blogsite at
http://matthewdsweet.com with the word’s “plexi jr.” in them (long story short – Plexi Jr is the model name of a guitar amplifier). Here’s one of the posts -
view the Plexi jr. post here.
Step 2. I went to Google alerts and set up a search for the term “plexi jr.” Google Alerts is a free service that Google provides. It will send you an email when they find the key words you’re interested in on the web. If you’re a business person, you should have a Google alert set up for your business name at the very least. Google alerts can be found here
Step 3. Wait for Google to send me an email with a link back to my post.
Step 4. Laugh out loud because Google had visited my site within two days and indexed it with the words “Plexi Jr”!
Step 5. Check Google. Do a Google search for the term “Plexi Jr.” As of this writing, my post is number two on the Google results (via the Tumblr tag “plexi jr”). And a direct link to my post itself is number ten on Google. Here’s the search results for
“plexi jr”
What is the moral of the story? My takeaway from this little experiment is that Google is a machine and it can be trained. When I set up an alert for the term “Plexi jr”, I’m sending Google on a mission to find what people are saying about it and bring it back to me on an ongoing basis. I’m telling Google what is important for me and naturally, they bring me back the freshest results.
Secondly, Tumblr Rocks! The fact that my site is a Tumblr site is helping me get searched and indexed by Google. Tumblr is already an optimal platform for blogging and obviously has Google’s attention. For more about Tumblr, check out my previous post explaining it.
Enjoy,
Marketing
On Monday, we created a new Vimeo account for MyTicor. On Tuesday, I received a Google alert letting me know that Google had found the account. This is good news to me considering that one of the two videos that I uploaded wasn’t described or tagged at all (meaning, I haven’t given any of the search engines much to go on as far as indexing is concerned).
