SEO Experiment – Google Docs

I love Google Docs! It’s a handy online way to store and collaborate documents online.

I have been using it for ages but it seems to be getting even better. Much more features (especially with spreadsheets) and a sleeker interface.

I have only managed to use up 51% of my 1 gig free cloud hosting, but will no doubt upgrade when the time comes as the prices are very good.

One thing I have had in the back of my mind for a while now is leveraging Google Docs for SEO. Surely any public documents that link back to a website would be a great advantage to a business? Google Docs has a PageRank of 8!

So the experiment I am conducting is to monitor how Google webmaster tools treats documents stored in Google Docs.

I created a document for one of my current SEO clients. The private link can be found here.

Next Step, convert it to a PDF and upload it back to Google Docs. It is now public with the title Custom Timber Furniture Melbourne.

I hope to do an updated post in the future with results.

Custom Timber Furniture Melbourne

Doing a little SEO at the moment for a local furniture store servicing Melbourne and am starting to get the results on the board.

Their website is a static HTML site, which is painful to work with as each page has it’s own file. I am so used to changing all the pages from one file not 20 or so different files! Today I logged in via FTP to add some IMG ALT tags to a couple of images that hyperlink to main pages.

One SEO advantage a static HTML website has over a content management system is that it can load much quicker as it does not have to make requests to a database.

Connected to the website is a Zencart shopping cart which I have made a few SEO tweaks to leverage the 500+ pages of shopping cart furniture items back to the main site.

My keywords this month – Furniture Melbourne, Custom Furniture and Timber Furniture.

Some of the strategies I have been using this week are to take advantage of popular article sites and create some re-spun articles from some of the ones I have received from the client.

How do I re-spin an article some may ask? Manually. It’s the only way to get a decent result that is human readable. I have tried article spinning software in the past with some pretty poor results. For example, my phrase of “how to create custom furniture”, could be translated to “fitting procedure construct within”.

??? WTF! Much better off re-writing the article from scratch and making as readable as possible with only a few SEO tweaks to point back to the clients website.

This has had some great results in the past. Why? Because similar articles link to my content and vice versa. This means that strong similar content is already linked to your article which then in turn is linked to the clients website.

Over time these articles can become even stronger, hopefully gaining page rank and high placement in the search engines.

Wedding Ceremony Music

Got a new short-term SEO gig for a local jazz band based in Melbourne which should net some great results for the client.

The keywords I will be aiming to build in the search engines will be …

1. wedding music
2. wedding bands
3. wedding bands Melbourne
4. wedding ceremony music
5.  corporate entertainment

At the start of this project, only one keyphrase  was listed in Google … at about 55 (six pages deep!!!)

After a few hours of SEO, I have checked one week later and three pages are now indexed. Still a few pages down, but definitely on the move.

Business Insurance Brokers

This post is a follow up on the one I did for MIB -Melbourne business insurance brokers.

My last post focused on types of insurance and some SEO methods I was going to implement for this project.

The SEO has been quite successful, taking the top position for “Insurance Brokers Melbourne” and moving steadily up the rankings for the prized two – public liability insurance and professional indemnity insurance.

This will be an ongoing project, so there will be more posts to follow with some data captures to show how well the movement is progressing.

This week I have also built up some backlinking through more social bookmarking site. Some I have been using for years, some I have just discovered. Here are some awesome sites to check out – Digg, diigo, linkagogo, bibsonomy, signalwebsite, a1-webmarks.

A1-webmarks.com is especially cool, as it carries a pagerank of 6! The links are dofollow so do yourself a favor and get your website on it before the next Google pagerank update kicks in!

Best Anti Cellulite Cream

This post kicks off some SEO for Guam Beauty Pharm, the only authorised reseller of Guam cellulite muds and creams.

This stuff is massive in Italy where it is used by over a million satisfied customers.

The keywords I want to focus on for this project are mainly combinations of the title of this post. E.g. cellulite cream, which gets around 480 local searches monthly in Google at the time of posting.

The next best search term I will try to focus on will be best cellulite cream (210 searches), followed by anti cellulite (170 searches) and anti cellulite cream (140 searches).

They may seem like low search terms. However they are the best ones that will convert to sales, which at the end of they day, that’s what it is all about.

The main thing I will be doing is a bit of blogging, article directories and social media / bookmarking sites. I find a combination of these things get not only the quick results, but the backlinks are long-term. As the creator of the content, I have full control over the links, meaning they will not just vanish overnight.

Nowa Nowa General Store

Had a quite day.

Still managed to get a little bit done for my parents business. I have had it on my TO DO list for over a year now and since I am on my holiday’s I thought now was a good time to give them an online presence.

Nowa Nowa General Store - Courtesy of Google Streetview

I have started a WordPress website for the town they now live in, Nowa Nowa. Which I hope to fill with all sorts of useful information for visitors that they can cross promote with.

I also set up a few social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. I have also claimed the Fourquare listing and submitted the business details to Google Places.

I hope to claim the number one position for the search term Nowa Nowa, which currently doesn’t have much competition in the search engines.

Plumbers Templestowe

Today I am doing some basic SEO for a plumbing business located in the Templestowe area that services the following surrounding suburbs.

1. Plumbers Templestowe
2. Plumbers Ringwood
3. Plumbers Park Orchards
4. Plumbers Donvale
5. Plumbers Mitcham

The first thing I do when a new client comes aboard is run my Market Samurai program to see where the site currently ranks in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

This site is in pretty good shape! Most of the on page SEO was done well in advance and ranks highly for these search terms.

All that needs to be done in the on page department is to upload a sitemap and submit it to the big three search engines. I also plan to setup a static RSS feed as I can then also submit the site to some of the many sites that love RSS feeds.

My job will mainly focus on the off page SEO, which will be articles and blog posts to build up the backlinks for this new site.

The beauty of this project is the head-start I have! Having previously done some work for another plumbing website (focusing on different suburbs) I have mountains of content that can be reworked to get some quick results on the board.

Solar Solutions

Today I have been doing some SEO for a Melbourne based company that offers all types of solar solutions. There services extend to commercial and industrial clients.

First step with their website was to have a quick scan through the coding which found some bits and pieces that needed to be removed. It was a static HTML site so it had a lot of references to a stylesheet that no longer existed which was really slowing the site down.

With that out of the way, I then looked to hyperlink a few keywords to certain pages within the site to let the search engines know what words I want them to rate highly.

Over the last couple of weeks, the site has had some great movement – mainly from the offsite SEO I have been doing.

But I feel these on page tweaks with a fresh sitemap (I use XML Sitemaps to generate one) submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Bike Racks, Barricades & Bus Shelters

With a title as cool as this you would be thinking it is some new blockbuster movie … or some b-grade chick flick starring Jennifer Aniston.

Not so. These are completely random keywords for my latest SEO project. Whoever thought anyone could be as bold as to squeeze three seemingly unrelated words together and wrap them up in neat little package… I would.

Amazingly enough, one company produces all of these items (and much more), hence the one post / three key phases strategy I am going for.

1. Bike Racks: You know those bike racks that find out the front of shops? Yeah, they make those!
2. Barricades: They make a variety of various types of barricades and bollards, temporary fencing, you name it!
3. Bus Shelters: One company makes all this stuff? You have got to be kidding! No, I was surprised myself.

So what’s on the cards for this project? Pretty light on-page SEO but massive off-page SEO. My plan is to build on the amount of backlinks the product pages have. This should ensure it will hold good positions in the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Types of insurance

There are heaps of different types of insurance I found today while doing a day of SEO for a local insurance broker called MIB.

I am trying to focus on two main services they do for key phrases. One being public liability insurance, a must have for most businesses in case something goes wrong. The second one is professional indemnity insurance, which is useful in the situation that incorrect or negligent advice results in a court case.

It has been a slow start to this project as we have transferred over domains from http://www.mibrokers.com.au to a more keyword oriented domain name – http://www.melbourneinsurancebrokers.com.au.

While the name is much longer, I find that Google and the other search engines, really like keyword domains, listing them much higher with much less work at my end.

Not many of the keywords and phrases I am hoping to get some movement in are even listed in Google. This is great from my point of view. It means I can’t really go backwards, which can happen when messing around with domains and 301 redirects.

Should have some awesome results by the end of this one.