$15 and 7000 page impressions later…

Throwing www.westkelownafires.ca up was an interesting endeavor. It took an evening to get the domain and blog up and running, and around 10 minutes of time per blog entry. All considered the website probably absorbed 8 hours of time and in the first week of being live managed to obtain 5,000+ page views, almost entirely through search engines.

This ended up being an interesting project for me. It was a great test to find out just how fast a website can be live and indexed. The domain was active almost immediately after purchase (which isn’t always the case), and it took 24 hours for the search engines to index the site and include it in the rankings for “west kelowna fires” and similar search terms.  A number of first page rankings created peak traffic on July 23rd, reaching 1,500 page impressions in a single day.

Now the topic of the West Kelowna Fires is a touchy one, but this concept, maybe we can call it opportunistic search optimization, can play a valuable roll in business strategy. Let’s say it was a different topic, a topic where homes aren’t threatened by fire and thousands of people aren’t forced out of their houses. It should also be a topic that will live longer than a month or two. Let’s say the topic is the Pine Beetle – just as devastating to our forests but at least it’s not threatening human life. You can bet your bottom dollar the situation is going to get a ton of media coverage from radio and television. And let’s assume you run a landscaping company that can easily adapt to offer services that will protect trees from the beetle. You throw up a website, pinebeetleprotection.ca, and talk about the entire story. Why the public should be concerned and what they can do to protect the trees on their property. I’ve heard of a number of solutions, from nets covering the trees to pheromones that repel the beetle. Whatever the case is, you help the site visitor understand the threat, and subtly offer your services. It’s really not as far-fetched as you might think, and I’d be more than happy to lend a helping hand.

Search engine experiment success!

Back in February I started a new “experiment” website covering the little maqui berry native to Patagonian region of South America.  This isn’t a new concept for me, in July of 2007 I started an experiment website covering the acai berry. The acai berry exploded with popularity and suddenly my site had a ton of competition – which makes ranking well in the search engines for a 2-3 hour per week hobby very difficult. So I decided to level the playing field when I heard about the maqui berry, a berry that reportedly has a higher antioxidant concentration than the acai berry with much less hype and media coverage – therefore less competition.

But that’s enough background – to the point. In it’s 4th month of existence www.maquiresource.com is now ranking on the first page for “maqui berry” in Google. The new goal? Improve that 9th place ranking into the top 3. That top 3 position can be the difference between hobby revenue and revenue that might actually help me make my car payments every month

Maqui Berry Resource

I’ve started a new website to cover all things about the maqui berry. After running Acai Resource since July, 2007 and seeing that niche grow from <100,000 pages in Google to 6 million pages in Google, I wanted to start a new site on a related topic that didn’t have quite so much competition in Google. The maqui berry grows in Patagonia, versus the acai berry in the Amazon Rainforest. There are many similar qualities between the two berries, but what makes the maqui berry stand out is it’s amazing antioxidant levels – it boasts an ORAC score higher than any known fruit, so I have high hopes for this new berry. None the less, Acai Berry Resource will remain a priority.

Competition is everywhere…

Yet, there are some places less competitive than others. Of course I mean this from a web development, search engine optimization perspective.

I’m not going to get into the details, but after meeting with an old friend who was visiting from Germany , an idea crept into my head. Maybe my hobby website, Acai Resource, would be of interest in Germany. I’m not too sure how information travels from country to country, but what I do know is there is 1/10th the competition for the German equivalent of the acai berry. I’m having difficulty getting the site to rank well for “acai” and “acai berry” – when I started the site there was very little competition, but then the acai berry got some good press and overnight the competition in Google doubled. Although there are some longer phrases that perform well for the website, I’m not content with sitting on the 10th page for “acai”. So I’m trying a new angle – lets see if climbing to the top of google.de is a worthwhile endeavor.