Owen's X10 Blog

Up to this point I’ve hinted at the attention to Google my job has begun to require. You see not only do I create the sparkle, but I help with the shine. While Lyndsey, or Princess Copywriter as we have become accustomed to calling her, does her thing – and the SSI Master himself (Marko) clicks keys, confirming CSS styles all the while maintaining his European mystique………..I knock out the imagery and find other holes to fill.

With the morning rain I roll in typically at 8:47 and 43 seconds, parking two spaces from the end as I always do. Check my pockets…cell phone….Ipod….car keys? Got em’. Slide through the glassy exterior of X10 into the belly of the beast. Up the stairs I climb, through a waking call center. Clock In, Log In, and get the day rolling. Quickly, I finish updating our reporting spreadsheets so Marko can inform the world that we sold another wall mounting bracket. And the day goes on…

One important part of hearing the rumblings of Google’s movement, for me anyway, is to pay attention to WebProNews. This is typically how I receive notice of new services, changes, and other interesting SEO happenings. Exciting right? Well it has been important for not only the x10 websites I’ve been working on – but also my own personal site.

I am no insider by any means, and if you are up to date than this can be seen merely as a refresher. So my team is responsible for producing new websites to X10. As I’ve mentioned up to this point we have created the Protector Plus site and the MiniTimer site. The first thing I would like to mention is Google’s “Sandbox”. My reading and experience has shown that new websites have a certain state of WWW purgatory before Google will see them fit for indexing. The “sandbox” is for the young websites to play in, while the big boys are running wild on the playground. So what helps?

(The following is my opinion, and will not lessen the lameness of your site)

External Links: Links from other respected, high page-ranking sites. This is where many small website owners fail. Link exchanges, can be more of a hindrance than a help. Just because your url shows up on 100 websites on the web does not make you more important to Google. Try to find solid sites to post your link. Try forums with high traffic that if possible are related to your site…

BigDaddy: Sometimes your Google indexing will fluctuate. And yes sales can suffer. Recently Google updated their Datacenters – (google bigdaddy for info). One day we had 15 links on google and the next 0. Three days later we flat lined at 240. Be patient.

Some useful tools from google:
http://www.google.com/coop (a place for people in the know – to share their expertise)
http://www.google.com/trends (a tool to see google popular searches over time.
http://pages.google.com (creates, hosts, and publishes websites for free – and fast)
http://groups.google.com (create your own web group, basically a forum)
http://labs.google.com/ (a directory of tools like those above, and other google ideas)

A useful link analysis tool: http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/index.html
(we are pretty positive that the data displayed is not 100% accurate but an adequate resource for seeing movement)

And finally – check out www.bruceclay.com – this site has a lot of tools (many free) that can help you see how your website is doing.

A quick peek outside tells me washinton is still bathing - I better float on home.