The next step in this site’s SEO efforts is out of my hands, unfortunately, and that is to build content on the site worth linking to.  Link baiting is a VERY important aspect of search engine optimization, and many companies and businesses don’t realize the importance of having other sites write about you and link to you.  This is a more powerful version of word of mouth marketing, as it really doesn’t matter what is said about you, as long as someone else’s site is linking to you.  That link build reputation power, and THAT is what Google likes.  Someone could say something bad about SEO Columbus not being the premier SEO firm in central Ohio, but as long as there is a link to our site, we get “points” in the old Google reputation book.  And within a week, nobody is going to read that old article anyway – but the reputation points from the link pointing to your site remain.  This is one of the lessons we cover in our Advanced SEO training classes, *shameless plug*, by the way. 

Now that we’ve shown how to get a new, non-indexed site to be ranked #1 in Google for its targeted keyword phrase in less than 48 hours, it’s time for us to move on to a new topic.  Keep checking back here at SEOColumbus.com for more training tips and SEO pointers, along with real world examples, every day. 

And if you need your site to be ranked at the top of the search engines, and need proven expertise to help you get there, just use the Contact Us form link at the top of this page to tell us about your project and request a quote.  Look for our rate list to make its way to our site within the next couple of days as well, by request of many visitors.

The next thing we are going to do is create an XML sitemap for Google.  The quickest and easiest way to do this is to use the XML Sitemap Generator tool, entering the URL for the site to have its sitemap created.  Within a few seconds, you will have an XML sitemap to save and load to your own site.  There is some tweaking that should be done to that XML file before loading to your site, such as making sure the pages included are pages you want Google to find and index, as well as giving each page a priority between 0.9 and 0.1, with the homepage getting a 0.9 priority and other pages mixed in based on how you would prioritize them.  Once this is done and uploaded to your site (make sure it can be found at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), then you will want to be a part of Google’s Webmaster Central, and let them know that you have a sitemap created for your site.  The details of this will be reserved for another post, but you need to create an account in the Webmaster Tools section of Google Webmaster Central and enter the information about the sitemap you just created.  Before long, all of those pages will be indexed by Google as well.

The last part of this phase of the case study is to clean up what is the single most important aspect of search engine optimization – and that is the Title tag.  The title tag we had been using was displaying: bluejacketsbuzz.com.  That’s it.  Free SEO Tip – Please note that using your domain name in the title tag is a terrible waste of a very valuable asset.  Your title tag should include something that people would actually type into a search engine when they want to find your site.  They aren’t going to be using your URL, otherwise they wouldn’t need the search engine (besides, if they do enter your URL into a search engine, they will find your site anyway – even without having it in the title tag.)  In our case, we want to target “Blue Jackets Buzz” and “Columbus Blue Jackets Blog“.  Therefore, both of these phrases now make up the title tag for this site, separated by a dash.  Now we’ll wait and see if we can get ranked for these two keyword phrases.  Really, this should be enough to get listed.  It will probably take more work and some worthwhile content to get the #1 spot, but this is how you should begin the process of great SEO for your site.

As you can see from the image below, the site, BlueJacketBuzz.com, isn’t found in Google at all at the time of this posting (11:45 pm. on Monday, June 9, 2008).  You can easily see whether or not a site is indexed in Google by typing site:bluejacketsbuzz.com (or any domain name) into a search box on Google.com.  Ad according to the Google Analytics that are set up on the site, it looks like I am about the only person that has visited the site.  It has 2 unique users and 5 total visitors right now – all of which were direct visits meaning the visitor typed the name into their browser and not by using the search engines.

I am not going to submit the site to Google or any other search engine, or use any methods to submit this site to any search engine, as that really is a waste of time.  Instead, I’m going to create an inbound link for the site by using optimized anchor text such as Blue Jackets Buzz, with the link pointing to the site.  I’ll also send a link to the same site using the text Columbus Blue Jackets Blog.

That’s all.  One inbound link from SEO Columbus. Now I just need to publish this article and wait to see what happens.  SEO is kind of like planting a garden.  Dig the dirt, plant a seed, add a little water, and wait… 

Step 1, I need to purchase a domain name. I spent a lot of time trying to find domain names with keywords built in, as this will ultimately help with immediate search engine scoring. After kicking around a few ideas, some of the best and most logical were taken by people that never built a site and do not provide accurate contact information (frustrating topic for another day). I finally settled on BCSFootballPlayoffs.com. BCS because of the current college football ranking system, and “football playoffs” because, well, that is going to be the topic of the new site and likely a target keyword for people searching the site. The word college would have been great too, but I chose not to lengthen the domain name to be longer than necessary.

So as of last Thursday I purchased the domain name ($7.82 expense) and set up hosting on a shared plan that I already own for several of my other sites. By Thursday evening we are up and running with a blank page when you go to to the site.

On Friday, I created the site in Dreamweaver and quickly slap together an index page. I put a title page on it “NCAA College Football Playoff System”, and some basic rudimentary left hand navigation. I tried to think of keyword based links for the navigation (more important than the actual pages at this point). Most of my time spent is creating the image found on the right side of the page, portraying my proposed college football playoff structure. These brackets are as of the BCS system in place on Friday evening (and before the Buckeyes were knocked from the top spot). But I’ve built the image in Fireworks and the PNG file will allow me to modify it quickly and easily every time new BCS polls are released. The image won’t be for the search engines obviously, but will provide a visual to human visitors that will ultimately be visiting the site.

I went to a couple of other sites that I own to add a text link to this new site, and labeled the anchor text as “NCAA College Football Playoff System” just as this link did, and now I get to sit back and wait for a little while. The important thing is to get the spiders to visit the page. I’ll work on cleaning up the page and adding content during the rest of the week. Until then, I can look at the site’s log files to see if any spiders have visited, and also check any email that may come to the site. I’m not expecting any, of course, because there is very little visibility to the site just yet. I actually prefer it that way, because the site is not attractive, not entirely functional, and not really worth displaying to people at this point. However, is the SE’s want to see it, that is all I am looking for at this point. At this point, I didn’t even add Google Analytics to the site, although I should have. I will do that later today.

Now I have time to truly work on the site design and layout, as well as prepare my specific marketing plan, while the site itself builds a “credit report” of existence with the search engines, being available any time they decide to crawl it.

I will post more steps and chart the progress in the next couple of days with the next steps to making this site extremely visible, and maybe share some goals for the site (shooting high with TV/radio interviews, ESPN The Magazine mention, local newspaper?). Remember, this site will be “The Authority” on why college football needs a playoff system, so I’d also be more than happy to hear some of your expectations and goals for this site, and perhaps I can incorporate them into the marketing strategy as well. The point of this blog is to show you how to grow a site from scratch, and it doesn’t matter so much what the idea is as much as the steps and actual practice of taking it big. This would be the same practice for your business or blog as well, as really only the site name would change.