The BrownBoots Blog

As you may have read in my previous post on Michigan Website Development I went through a process of selecting keywords and key phrases (Michigan web design, Michigan website seo, Michigan web development, web design Michigan) with WordTracker and creating a blog posting using the selected keywords in order to illustrate how blogging can support SEO efforts.

I’m happy to say that the theory is working. As of July 15th 2008 my blog posting comes up 38th on google and 29th on MSN. Yahoo is the best…I’m up to number 7. First page!

Prior to my blog posting I had absolutely no content on my site related to Michigan. Going from no content and not being listed to getting rather good placement with very little effort is worth noting.

I will continue to track the climb up the rankings. I am now curious to know how a second posting on the subject will help.

I attended several classes recently (I taught a couple as well) put on by the Fond du Lac Area Association of Commerce. The classes are great, as any classes are, at giving me an opportunity to think over how we do things here at BrownBoots. I was particularly interested in diving deeper into the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how it may pertain to blogs.

I ended up walking myself through the same process we use for our clients in order to validate my assumption that posting relevant content on a blog could lead to enhanced website rankings for a particular keyword or phrase. I started by turning to WordTracker in an effort to uncover key phrases such as “website development”, or “web design” that are searched for often but don’t have a high number of competing sites. I put in a number of generic terms like “web”, “design”, “website”, “development”, “seo” in hopes of digging up some magic combinations.

I didn’t expect much in return because those phrases are very generic and very popular. I was surprised to find that there must be a big problem in our neighboring state of Michigan because there were a very large number of combinations that came back with the phrase Michigan included. “Michigan web design”, “Michigan website seo”, “Michigan web development”, “web design Michigan” were all key phrases that seem to be very popular with not much competition.

This blog posting is designed to do two things. First, point out (as I did above) how building a website should not be the goal any more. A complete online marketing effort needs to be the focus. If you simply build a website and don’t continue to look at the entire process including seo and blogging, you may be underutilizing today’s technology.

The second purpose of this post is experimental. I am putting into practice what we recommend our clients do. I identified some key phrases to target and I’m now using those key phrases in our blog. By identifying “Michigan web design’, “Michigan seo”, and “Michigan website development” as key phrases and using them appropriately in the headline and the body of this blog posting I would imagine there would be a certain amount of traffic generated.

I will be teaching the next ACU class in Fond du Lac on June 22nd. I will be talking about website statistics and how to interpret them affectively. I may very well be using this blog posting as a case study.

P.S. If you are from Michigan and found this posting by searching for “Michigan website development” or if you happen to be looking for SEO services for your Michigan based company, we’re just across the pond!