I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking:
“Yeah, you can draw pictures. OK, you can make things spin round in flash. Sure, you can put together and mark-up a pretty mean web page. That’s all well and good. But can you get traffic to my site and get me high up on search engines? ...” and my answer would be this: “Yes.”
Or something along those lines.
Let’s look at some examples and numbers from websites I have developed:
kevadamson.com :
- freelance Illustration in google : position 1 out of 297,000
- freelance graphic design in google : position 6 out of 1,340,000
- freelance design in google : position 5 out of 987,000
- freelance web design in google : position 1 out of 781,000
- freelance animation in google : position 1 out of 2,680,000
behinddesign.co.uk :
- freelance php in google : position 2 out of 3,380,000
- freelance programmer in google : position 4 out of 2,170,000
- freelance php programmer in google : position 1 out of 2,070,000
davelloydcoaching.com :
- cycling coaching in google : position 2 out of 1,970,000
- cycling coach in google : position 2 out of 2,160,000
meritgolf.co.uk :
- golf surfaces in google : position 2 out of 2,160,000
- artificial surfaces for golf in google : position 5 out of 1,710,000
( Results as of August 2007 – they do fluctuate slightly, but they all come up on the first page of google results )
So, how’ve I got these results? Well, to be fair, many of the sites above have been online for quite a while, and time is one of the biggest factors on how well a site is positioned. That combined with:
- common sense title tags and descriptions
- good clean semantically correct mark-up
- quality and regularly updated content (written for humans and not the SEO spiders, btw – don’t fall into that trap. It’ll just make your site appear cheap, nasty and desperate, and may also got yer chucked off the search engines for spamming)
- quality relevant links to and from the site
- some statistical analysis
- some patience
- 30g of butter
- 250g of raisins
- 25ml of freshly squeezed lemon juice
- 2 heaped teaspoons of sugar
Place the mixture in a baking tray and place in a pre-heated oven on gas mark 8 for … wait a minute … tangent.
Bed, me thinks …
COMMENTS
I just want to say that when you say Google you do mean Google UK and not Google.com which is fab from a UK point of view. But you still come 4th on Google.com for “freelance illustration” also very good indeed!
BTW… I am currently the number 10 google.co.uk “John”, something to be proud of! ;)
Heh! Just tried “Kev” and I’m 3rd! Well, if any of you out there are looking for a Kev or a John, you know where to look.
Is google.com when you search the web and not pages from the UK? Or is it another site entirely. I’m always logged in to my google account – every time I go to google.com it redirects me …
Ahhh, I see. There’s a very obvious link to google.com on google uk that I missed. Heh!
OK. Let’s do a little recap now I’ve worked out the uk .com thing …
“Kev” – 9th (google.com)
“Freelance Illustration” – 4th (google.com)
“Freelance Design” – Bah! 11th … but out of 43 million (google.com)
“Freelance Graphic Design” – 23rd … Booooo! (google.com)
“Freelance Web Design” / “Freelance Animation” – 11th. Nay bad (google.com)
“Freelance PHP Programmer” – 8th (google.com)
“Cycling Coaching” – 2nd (google.com)
“Golf Surfaces” – 4th (google.com)
Cheers John (‘’,) Not forgetting that yer good self did perhaps the best bit of SEO for my own site by awarding it a WSA a couple of years ago – that certainly got the ball rolling with it. Big’up!
I wonder how much difference it would make if one used Jif lemon?
@Graham : That’s the question isn’t it. It could shoot you to the top of every search engine for any keyword ever … or … leave Google with a bitter (yer see the connection) taste in its mouth, banning you from every search term and from ever accessing the internet by sending out a unique algorithm that chops yer arms off. Yeah. Al-’gore’-rithm …