milsoms.com blog

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:

1. The game started at 10.00 am on 8 September 2006.
2. Build a fairly simple web site about the name Keith and fairly heavily optimised for the keyword ‘keith’.
3. 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.
4. 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!)
5. 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).
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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
10. 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
11. Better have a link to the Keith site in this blog as well so here it is - http://keith.milsoms.com
12. 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
13. 17:50 8 Sep - put a link to the Keith site on the index page of Anything Left-handed (my own PR6 site)
14. 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!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Keith project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.