The Experiment

In case you didn’t read my previous blog, my plan was to try and get ranked in the top ten for Google.com for the term “Business Software Solutions” in 90 days. If you skip to the bottom you’ll see that I made it but here’s the time line.

My IBP Software SEO Scorecard Timeline

Nothing done – new site, installed WordPress and that’s about it

June 5 2009 = 30% – first run, site is live but that’s about all

• choose my keywords Business Software Solutions – (hey why not put it on this page, it’s legit right?)
• Added heaps more content,. 5 large blogs, new product page, added keywords to existing site and description to home page that was missing
• I have created a free piece of software and submitted it to www.tucows.combut I am waiting for them to publish it and don’t have a backlink yet.
• Added a paid advertisement with www.finda.co.nz which is a New Zealand business directory that includes www.ubd.co.nz – These sites rank very well in NZ and allow me cheap access to local, potential customers.
• Submitted my site to www.Google.com and www.bing.com and www.yahoo.com and paid for annual site search option with yahoo.com
• created an account with www.cnet.com and I am now able to upload my application to upload.com – they check your entries so it takes a few days.

June 13 2009 = 35% – a nice jump for week one but I did do alot of the ground work this next week will be tougher but then Google will start ranking me and I should see some progress without doing too much – pretty please Mr Google

OK so a couple more days and still not seeing any global links form the search engines and I am getting pretty disappointed so I start looking more closely at what else I can improve.

I notice that I don’t have my keywords in any body test on my home page. Hmmm, so I figure that’s OK I can just create a new post and it will show there but the way my theme works it doesn’t so I start looking at my theme options and one in particular is widgets, I hadn’t played with these until now but they killed birds with one stone. I turn on the tag cloud in the spot where I have a place holder for advertisements that I am not using.

Next I look at key words in H1 headers and I have a suggestion in my IBP report to add software to at least one H1 tag so I do, Run the report again and BAM!

June 16 2009 = 59% and I haven’t even got links on Google yet! I love IBP so I’m going to head over there now and see if I can get a link to this review….

So this week was a bit busy, well quite busy, well actually I can’t think straight because my head hurts. So I didn’t spend the tim eon this I had planned  that’s OK because I am a realist and because desptie my week I still got stuff done. Plus I really believe that now I won’t see much improvement until Google stats to crawl my pages and others and finds some back links to me. But here is this weeks activity report

Created a pad file for my PowerSlave give away and used a submission program to post it to some 200+ sites. The pad file is basically a common structure fore storing the details like where is the file located, a description, a screen shot etc. Each day I am starting to get confirmations of acceptance as the submissions are check.

So this week was a bit busy, well quite busy, well actually I can’t think straight because my head hurts. So I didn’t spend as much time on SEO as I had planned but that’s OK because I am a realist and because despite my week I still got stuff done. Plus I really believe that now I won’t see much improvement until Google starts to crawl my pages and others and finds some back links to me. But here is this week’s activity report

1. Created a pad file for my PowerSlave give away and used a submission program to post it to some 200+ sites. The pad file is basically a common structure for storing the details like where is the file located, a description, a screen shot etc. Each day I am starting to get confirmations of acceptance as the submissions are checked.
2. Added a new product SUN2Outlook that allows people to view their SunAccounts contacts  in an address book panel within Outlook. I still feel that content is king so I am really pushing the content angle.
3. Added product pages for a suite of integration options I made for Attaché 7 acocunts
4. Created YouTube videos showing each of my products and made sure the descriptions on the YouTube site link back to my site
5. This one is AWESOME, I emailed IBP and asked about getting a link to my review. Rather sensibly they said they couldn’t because I was and affiliate. That’s fair enough but they said that they had seen the review because they were using Google Alerts. I didn’t even know about Google Alerts but I’m sold. This has been so useful. It is another FREE Google service that lets you define terms of interest and it will send you a daily digest of new content posted that refers to those terms. ( actually there’s so many options you could do a whole blog on that separately)
6. So now, everyday I get a summary email from Google listing posts and articles on the web that refer to Power Saving and I scan them for suitable candidates. When I find one I jump to the site and post a feedback comment about how my product is relevant and then link to my site. I reckon I am creating2 good links a day, which doesn’t sound like much but my second biggest competitor only has 300+ links. If I can get 100-200 from software submissions (point 1) then I only need 2-3 months of this alone to catch them up.
7. Started joining user groups and forums and posting feedback that links to my site effectively direct marketing my products as well as getting links as I always have my site linked in my response.

Despite all of that (WOW I got a lot more done than I thought) I am still at 59% actually it jumps around and some days it says 58%. Still my biggest issue is global link popularity as “none of the analyzed search engines returned a different domain that links to your web site” that message is starting to haunt me already. The thing is that I know that there are dozens already and growing daily but still patience never was my strong spot hmm. So for now that’s me and I guess I will need to stick at it. I just got a message from one of the shareware sites I submitted to offering submission to another 500 so just maybe…

June 23 2009 59% – Still need to get those global links sorted

Quick update – I just noticed that today Google started ranking my pages and on my keywords I am at position 91 out of 119,000,000 – not bad for 2 weeks.

My Google ranking June 24 2009

Also Bing is now listed in IBP as having 7 links to my site, that’s not enough to affect my IBP score but then it isn’t showing Google links that are listed in Google Webmaster tools – strange

June 24 2009 – IBP = 59% and Google Ranking = 77 of 119,000,000

So curiousity is definately getting the better of me. I have been busy building link and today Google finally found the first 2 – yay! my IBP score just jumped to 64% but U need at least 70 for it to really move. I don’t mind because I know that I porbably have at least 150 now but it links back to me. What is cool is that this little change has also bumped me up to position 77 of 119,000,000 up 14 places since yesterday. So I am steadily climbing and once Google starts finding all of thos links it’s going to really move fast. I think I am on track so far with my 90day target and the best bit, is that this is less work than I expected.

Two key things, Google Alerts is helping my really build good quality links and IBP software is REALLY steering my in the right direction.

June 26 2009 – IBP = 61%  and Google Ranking = 77 of 119,000,000

Did some more work on the content and keywards in actual body text but also removed some over use of my search term mainly the landing page and my links are starting to kick in but I need to add more “relevant” outbound links as this is well withing my control. I am very happy that within 3 weeks my IBP score is now over the 60% mark especially as IBP only sees 2 links to my site and Iknow that there are actually 122 and more on the way. In my competitionlist links on google I am 9/10 but if it was seeing all of my links I would now be 4/10.

This weeks big effort has really been about using Google Alerts but I am planning a seperate post on that .

June 27 2009 – IBP = 67% and Google ranking 75 of 119,000,000

So I am in New Zealand and when I check saturday morning here it seems like somewhere else in the world Google and Bing have done a bunch of crawls or updates because that’s when my score seems to jump up.

June 30 2009 – IBP = 70% and Google.com 73 of 116,000,000 (should I be worried that google dropped 3,000,000 pages?)

small update because for whatever reason I just tried my local google which being in New Zealand is google.co.nz and I am in position 4

Holy crap I can’t quite believe it!! Position 4 in under 4 weeks I am amazed!!!!

July 3 2009 – IBP = 70% and Google.com 70 of 113,000,000 (another 3,000,000 – what gives Google?)

I just tried changing my preferences and searched only for pages in English and I get position 19 of 113,000,000 not bad for 4 weeks

Stop the press on my local Google.co.nz for pages in New Zealand I am in pole position – roll out the banners yee haw

In just 4 weeks I got to position #1 for my local search engine

July 10th – IBP = 67% and Google.com needs some explanation

So I noticed some odd behaviour (at least I think it’s odd). I use Vista and IE8 and have my default search provider set as Google.com. If I run Google.com as a site rather than the search bar I get different results and if I run Google.co.nz and search the web its different to google.com – So here are my detailed ranking.

• Google.com – 11 0f 1040,000,000
• Google.co.nz – search the web – 9 of 116,000,000
• Google.co.nz – pages from NZ – 1st of 46,300

Well a very busy week for me as I added a new product Onlooker for Outlook and the PowerSlave links keep pouring in 227 Links to Polychromenz.com now. My IBP score has dropped but that is because I am now also targetting a second search term “Accounting Software“.

So I am VERY happy that I am still moving up the Google.COM rankings especially as I am now 11th for the world and so very nearly in the elusive top ten and still have over 50days left in my challenge.

July 31- IBP 62% – I tweaked things to score higher on another term

In reality I should optimise different pages for each term but I have my reasons

• Google.com –  – 12 of 121,000,000
• Google.co.nz search the web – 8 of 121,000,000
• Google.co.nz – pages from NZ – 1 of 74,300

Not too much happening on the SEO as I focussed on my Onlooker for Outlook it reminds you if you forget to add an attachment in Outlook. I released it onto hundreds of shareware sites and it had 120+ downloads in the first 24 hours.

For reference here are some other terms I am working on

Google.co.nz pages from NZ

• Accounting Software – 26
• B2b – 39

August 7 – IBP 62% – still very much focussed on other keywords

Been updating the site alot thispast two weeks whilst developing a new website for a customer at the same time.

Business Software Solutions

Google.co.nz – pages from NZ #1

Google.co.nz – pages from the web  #6 of 107,000,000

Some of the other terms I am targeting

• google.co.nz pages from NZ
• Google.co.nz – nz pages
• Accounting software #27
• Business Software #10 (I was nowhere 3 weeks ago) IBP 67%
• B2B #43 up from 77 only 2 weeks ago
• B2b software #4 from nowhere two weeks ago