SEO and Soccer.

I finished 9th place in the Raven hunt scavenger hunt.  Won a shirt!  And we’re talking a high quality American Apparel one, not one of those crappy cheap brands.  Very cool little game they had going over the span of a week.

Don’t know Raven tools?  Then you should!  Check them out at  http://raven-seo-tools.com/

I am signed up for another year of MIMA goodness.  This is the first year that my employer is not paying for membership.  I think MIMA is great for networking and now my name badge says “freelancer” so it should be ten times more fun!  Look for me, I’ll be in the bar line.

On a totally unrelated note, I just got an email from a company that would like to promote my website.

“We would like to get your website on first page of Google.  All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized. Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.”

“Most ethical white hat” sounds pretty boring but I really hope they can help me out getting on the first page of Google.

I’ve been working on a fun site for a friend. It’s a lawn painting service in California.  What they do is go in and paint dead or dying grass to make it look better.  It’s non-toxic and helps save water.  I don’t know if they’d have enough paint to fix my lawn.  Lucky for me my lawn is covered with 3 feet of snow.

Check them out:  Lawn Paint Pros – Southern California

When you have amazingly talented friends like Lucas Saugen it makes it easy to do creative things.

This pic is an outtake from the 2009-2010 Minnesota Rollergirls trading card shoot.  It’s going to be a business card someday.

Three theories:

1)  They’re too busy working on other people’s sites so they neglect their own site.

2)  They’re absolutely terrible.  I ran across a self proclaimed seo “pro” website today (sorry – no link, it would move their inbound link count from 6 to 7).  If they couldn’t figure out why a splash page with no content on it is a bad thing then I wouldn’t really want to have them work on my site.

3) They are absolute geniuses and they don’t want to tip their hand about their awesome black hat tactics.

I’m guessing #1 or #2.  Or a mix of both.  But let us not forget apathy.  Never underestimate the power of not caring.

As an experiment in SEO, I figured I’d see how I’d rank for my name.   Of course I’m number one for my name “Joe Leyba” in all the major search engines.   Not much competition there.  So I recently set my sites on just my last name.  As of today, here’s where I rank in the major engines for “Leyba”:

Google – 10th

Yahoo – 2nd

Bing – Nowhere to be found

What’s most interesting to me is I can rank #1 in Bing for “Joe Leyba” but not rank in the top 100 for “Leyba”.  I’ll have to see what they hate me.

I know I’ve improved in Google because I checked how I ranked sometime last year and I was at #22.  I’ve never checked Yahoo or Bing before so I have no prior knowledge there.  For the most part I’ve neglected my domain.  I used it for image storage and experimenting at a cost of $4/month.  I’ve never been active in link building or trying to boost my awesome PageRank of 1.  So I’ll get a little more proactive and try to build my personal brand.  I’ll check back in three months to see if anything has changed.

Truth is I see the name Leyva far more often than Leyba.  Just today, FC Dallas midfielder Bryan Leyva has been called up by the Mexican Under-17 Men’s National Team for participation in the FIFA U-17 World Cup in Nigeria.  I’ve also seen another Leyva soccer player, Fatima Leyva, 28, who is a highly rated midfielder who plays for FC Indiana. She joined FC Indiana in 2005, and helped the club to two league and two cup titles in four seasons. She has played 45 times for Mexico, scoring four goals.

I found some message boards talking about the Leyva/Leyba/Leiva/Leiba name. One site said it is “Spanish: variant of Leiva, which is the habitational name a place called Leiva, chiefly the one in La Rioja province and to a lesser extent the one in Murcia.”

I’ve also found boards saying the name maybe of Sepharic Spanish/Jew and part of the Israel Tribe of Levi. The Tribe of Levi was scattered & the Leyba/Leyva’s are part of that lost tribe.  They were prosecuted as Jews and made to give up their culture and claim Spanish decent due to the the Catholic Church.

Anybody know any better?

BTW, when I Google “Leyba and Soccer” I come up #4 and that’s my Linkedin profile.  You’ll soon realize after watching me play soccer with the Indomitable Drinky Crows that soccer is better left to the Leyva’s.

A Google alert just came up for my name even though it’s not me.

http://www.news-bulletin.com/nb/index.php/la-vida/658-metal-artist-experiments-with-imagination.html

I’ve found there’s quite a few artists with the last name of Leyba.   Steven Johnson Leyba is the name I’ve seen most frequently online.  I’ll do some digging and try to profile some others.

My friend Cris helps build swimming pools for a living.
The company she works for, Derian Quality Pools,
designs pools and spas that are nicer (and bigger) than
my house.



You can check out their website here:
Southern California Swimming Pool Contractors