Peter Gurnz asked me to help him get his images to show up in google searches for "Peter Gurnz". I gave some suggestions and you may notice some of the methods used in his images. But this also opened the door for a great topic - SEO!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is increasingly becoming a priority for people who use the web to promote their business. When I started Dog Walker NYC, I didn't know much about websites, or marketing, or search engines. I did however have an idea about what dog owners would be doing when they decided to hire a dog walker. I figured they were sitting at their desk in their office at 6:45pm working late yet again (a very common thing in NYC), and they realized their dog was at home desperately needing to get out, or even worse the dog had given up and decided to piss on their brand new rug... YET AGAIN! What does one do in such a predicament? They google "dog walker new york city" and they call the first dog walking company in the search results.
My goal was obvious, get my website (dogwalkernyc.com) to become the #1 search result for those keywords. Every stressed out dog owner in New York City would call me. So I started researching search engine optimization, I emailed my website host, I emailed my domain host, I bought other domain names like "dogwalkernewyorkcity.com". I bought inexpensive ads on pet related websites that would link to my website. I tried buying search engine optimization services from Yahoo and I paid for adwords with Google.
Many times everyday I would search "dog walker new york city" to see how far down my website was in the search results - and I found that certain practices were improving my SEO more then others. So I focused on them and within about 9 months I was in the top 10. It took 6 more months to get up to #2 and another 3 months to pass the #1 result. That was a serious accomplishment. It paid off though, to this day I still get 1-3 phone calls a day for Dog Walker NYC - and I sold it off over a year ago.
The great thing about this is - now we implement the same strategy used for Dog Walker NYC's SEO on Ekaweeka and improving your own SEO. We do a lot, and we can only do so much. If you want to help your own SEO, start posting links on your website and / or Ekaweeka profile to other websites with content that is related top yours. Send emails to webmasters for related content websites and ask them to exchange links with you. In every link you post add a "title=my-keywords-" tag in the hyperlink. Use your keywords in the hyperlink.
Things that don't help a whole lot: buying other domains with related keywords in them, this seems links a great idea and many companies do it - but in reality you will just have to optimize that domain address too otherwise it is worth close to nothing in SEO value. Want to learn more? Send us an email to info (at) ekaweeka dot com. Tell us your website url and / or your Ekaweeka profile url and we'll take a look, make sure to mention your keywords, there is always a way to improve your SEO. And where these is good SEO there is more visibility to people looking for you in every corner of the planet!
Comments (2)
I comletely agree with you on the importance of SEO. It's a dirty little word for social networkers, but so necessary if you want to be found. The online world is too vast to rely on word of mouth alone.
Posted by Sandra | June 21, 2007 11:59 AM
Posted on June 21, 2007 11:59
I have a google alert set up for my name, which gives me an indication of which sites are more visible on the web. I started getting an alert almost right away for ekaweeka, and continue to get them, which is one reason why I chose this site to focus on.
Posted by Laura Iverson | June 21, 2007 1:19 PM
Posted on June 21, 2007 13:19