SEO Diary – Phase One

Search engine optimisation diary – Pt 1

Search engine optimisation, or “SEO” as i’m sure most people are aware by now is the process of getting a website high up the rankings of search engines such as Google and Yahoo.  SEO is something we specialise in, and we have got many of our clients on to the front page of Google.

Google is by far and away the leading search engine now, and although Yahoo and MSN are still important, I think most people would agree that Google are the dominant force when it comes to search technology.

Well, we at DeepSpace have just undergone a major redesign of our own website, and with this are reviewing our own search engine optiomisation and SERP’s (search engine ranking positions).  As i’m sure most professions will tell you that while being busy with customer and client affairs, it’s easy to neglect your own.

For example a decorator spends all week making other peoples houses look beautiful, while his own is getting shabbier and shabbier!

With this in mind, while redesigning our website we decided to carry out a full SEO report of our own website DeepSpaceDesign.

DeepSpaceDesign as a web company are based in West Sussex, and as such have only been concerned with ranking on Google for West Sussex, and our Google ranks reflect this.  Here is a quick break down of where we are for West Sussex:

Web design West Sussex: Ranked in fifth position

SEO West Sussex: Ranked in fourth position

Of course we are ranked highly for many other keyword searches eg: graphic design west sussex, logo design west sussex and flyer design west sussex, but for the purpose of this diary i’ll concentrate on the two main areas.

For those that aren’t aware the age of the website has an important role to play in how Google will rank a website, and as DeepSpaceDesign is not yet two years old we haven’t had high expectations of breaking in to the real competitive market.  For example the one website that is beating us for the term SEO West Sussex was created in 1999, a full 8 years before our own website.

Why is website age important for SEO?

Well to start with Google has a 12 month aging delay on new domain names.  They do this to prevent people from creating multiple websites and flooding the search positions.  They figure if a website is still around and being updated and maintained after 12 months then it is a serious website.  So a website that has been around for say 10 years will be given more importance than a website that has only been around for 18 months.   After this there is the matter of Google Page Rank.

Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank has in theory been around longer than Google itself.  PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name “Page” Rank) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype in 1998, named Google.  Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine.   The name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented. However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google.  Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University, and the university received 1.8 million shares in Google in exchange for this. A great bit of business by the Stanford University as the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million!

PageRank itself works by counting the number of links a website has directed towards it.  The logic is that if there are many websites pointing at one single website, then that website must be pretty important.  This is what Google themselves say:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.“

So, from this we know that the more websites that have links pointing to your own website, the more important Google will view your website, hence the higher it will rank your website in a search. Logically then the older your website is, the more links it will have pointing towards it. So technically a website that is 10 years old has a huge advantage over a website that is only 18 months old.

That being said, our domain name will be 2 years old in April 2009 so we decided it is time for a concerted push against the most competitive keywords on the web.

Time for some serious SEO!

The purpose of this diary is to report the progress of our full frontal assault on the most competitive keywords/phrases on the Internet today.  We feel it is time to put our money (and time) where our mouths are and see just how good we are at SEO.

The most competitive keywords on the Internet are, as you can imagine, “web design” and “SEO”.  The web was created by web designers, and a search for web design will bring up some of the oldest websites on the net. Web designers have known the importance of SEO since its first beginnings so you can imagine they’ve used every trick in the book to get on to that front page.  The same can be said for SEO companies.  SEO has been around for almost as long as search engines, so many of these SEO companies that are ranked highly for the term SEO company have been established for a long, long time and again have used every trick in the book to get there.  It is going to be hard for a relatively new website like ours to break in to that elite.  But for the first time since our conception we are prepared to try!

Current Google positions:

As web design and SEO are rather general terms we will also concentrate on adding “company” to these. This means we are opening a campaign on four fronts.

Here are our current Google positions for our most competitive keywords as of March 2009:

Web design:  Not in the first 100 pages

SEO: Not in the first 100 pages

Web design company: Ranked on page 65

SEO company: Ranked on page 31

As you can see we are literally coming from nothing!  It is going to be a tough undertaking, and one of the main things against us at the moment is PageRank.  We currently only have a PR2 .. and to have any chance of hitting the front page for terms as competitive as web design and seo company, we are going to need atleast a PR4.  So while I search for quality relevant backlinks to boost our PR, if anyone reading this would like to add us to any of the social bookmarking sites below it would be a great help.

I will post back in a months time and document whether we have managed to get in to that top 100.  Thanks very much.