SEO and Soccer.

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.

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.