I was talking with a friend and my son Tom about what I do and he said “if you are so clever, how come when I search for ‘keith’ in Google I don’t see you anywhere?”.
I explained that ‘keith’ was not one of my targeted business keywords but he still thought that if I was any good at marketing I would be able to become the number Keith on Google, and I guess he has a point!
So I took up the challenge and this is the story of what happened…
As of today, 8 September 2006, there are about 247 million results pages for a search for ‘keith’ on google.com and the number one slot is held by Rolling Stone Keith Richard - we’ll see about that!
This is what I have done:
- The game started at 10.00 am on 8 September 2006.
- Build a fairly simple web site about the name Keith and fairly heavily optimised for the keyword ‘keith’.
- I created a new subdomain keith.milsoms.com under my main domain as I think this will get it seen as a separate site by the search engines and get it a far tighter keyword focus.
- Each page has some Google Adsense on it so I have a quick flick through he pages to get the adsense spider to work out what the pages are about and put up relevant ads. I am getting a mix of ads on working at home, business planning, blogging, ancestry and music, but at least Google knows I am there (that may or may not help in getting the pages indexed and ranked but it can’t do any harm!)
- 14:00 8 Sep - Submitted the index page to about 100 search engines including Google (I am currently using the free version of Web CEO to do that).
- Set up a Google sitemap account for the site - first add the site to my Google Webmaster tools account, then choose to verify ownership of the domain by adding the metatag they specify to my index page.
- Create the sitemap to submit to Google - I use the free service at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to create the code, save it with my website pages, have a quick check to make sure it picked up all the site pages then upload.
- 15:00 8 Sep - Add the sitemap url to Google Sitemaps - in my case http://keith.milsoms.com/sitemap.xml
It can take a few hours for Google to follow the sitemap and spider the site, but refreshing the sitemap results page a few times seems to speed it up and mine was spidered in 2 minutes and all came up OK.
- 16:15 8 Sep - made blog entries for the site on 2 of my own left-handed Blogger blogs and pinged yahoo with the updates
- 16:30 made blog entry on my lefthandedchildren.org blog (Wordpress) and pinged the RSS feed to Yahoo plus pinged the Google sitemap link for it to Google
- Better have a link to the Keith site in this blog as well so here it is - http://keith.milsoms.com
- I have not actually announced this Blog or set up a Google sitemap link for it yet - I will make a separate entry about that later
- 17:50 8 Sep - put a link to the Keith site on the index page of Anything Left-handed (my own PR6 site)
- 17:55 8 Sep - put a link to the Keith site on the index page of LeftHandersDay (my own PR5 site)
That’s all for now folks - time for a beer!