I originally started the site back in late 2003, and it’s had 2 makeovers since.

It’s actually fun going on the Wayback Machine, to see how the layout and content has changed over the years. I’ve finally gone away from the green colour scheme that seemed to be a fallback for a few of my sites.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much change to the content. Back in 2003 I was teaching myself SEO, and the trend back then was hyphenated domain names and filenames and reciprocal link exchanges.  So I still have hyphenated domain and filenames – there’s no need to throw away the history, and if someone offered me a nice link that still remains, then I’ll keep it there, as you should.

And my keyword research back then showed that there was less competition for the long-tail phrases like “floral emblems of Australia“, than initial seaches like “flowers”.

It was easy to rank on Yahoo using hyphenated names, and I would get regular organic traffic from there and MSN. Google was always a hard nut to crack.

But despite the amount of time that I spend researching SEO and web development, with a normal job during the week, plus a couple of kids and dogs, I never really spent much time refining the site.

So recently I decided to try and vamp it up.

Being lazy, I bought Confession of a Lazy Internet Marketer, and was surprised to find that I was already doing 80% of the content and structure approach that he suggested.  Way back in 2003.

So as usual it comes down to SEO.  Some of his techniques I won’t use, in the link exchange area – I don’t feel like getting an ongoing paid membership to a linking site. But some of his other techniques for SEO are quite good. It’s interesting how they also overlap with some of the techniques used in 30 minute backlinks, which I also bought recently. So I will be using some of their techniques that they have in common. I think the 30 minute backlinks suggestions are easier for less technical people.

But I haven’t actually done any of their suggestions yet. I’m about halfway through preparing the groundwork.  So my Google rankings still need a lot of work.

And now I’m about to go out to a door shop, cos I really need to fix up the bottom room – it’s too crowded and dog oriented, and needs simplicity and lightening up.
Like a lot of websites I know.

One day the site will be finished. And then I can go on and revamp some more websites.

But now Brad Callen has gone and created a free AdWords keyword spy tool that will let anyone spy on what keywords their competitors are advertising with!

PPC Web Spy lets you see other keywords and ads used by your competitors.

Let’s say you are searching for “dog training”.
When you install this PPC spy tool into your (Firefox) browser, it creates a button under each ad.
Click the button and you can see the other keywords this person is also advertising for.
PLUS THE AVERAGE POSITION, COST PER CLICK, CLICKS PER DAY AND COST PER DAY!

This is absolutely priceless information. From a free tool!

One of the few times I really need to use upper case exclamation marks in my blog. It’s that good.

If you advertise on Google AdWords, you really need this tool.

PPC Web Spy

Another winner from Brad Callen.

Rather than trust any one keyword source, I used a few.
1. The free Google Keyword suggestion tool, to see how many searches happen in a month, and how tough the competition is.
2. A dummy AdWords campaign. Throw heaps of money at it, and estimate the number of clicks possible.
3. A paid keyword database. One of the most high profile keyword sources, with a relatively costly monthly subscription.

The variations were stunning. The paid database was under-estimated by multiple orders of magnitude. (This was for Australian figures). Apparently the figures come from deals with ISPs, select SEs and panel samples.

Given that the future was unreliable, I thought I’d try the past.

Went to Google Keyword Suggestions, and looked for the phrase “choosing a dog”.
Google suggested 1300 searches last month. (although the average is 1000/month)
I have number 1 position at Google for that phrase, so I went to Google Analytics to see how much traffic they sent me last month, specifically from Google. I got 284 hits, which was pretty nice. It also meant that position 1 at Google got me 21% of their searches last month. Not bad for MyDogSite.

Tried it with another keyword, to see if that was a fluke.
Google Keyword Suggestion tool said that last month, there were 6600 searches for “Halloween Australia” in Australia. I went to Google Analytics, and looked at my stats. Last month I got 521 hits from Google for that one keyword. Again, it was number one for the keyword at Google for most of the month, so that equated to 7% of the traffic. For interest, that was www.halloween-australia.com, so it would look pretty relevant to searchers.

For fun, I tried one last search, on a smaller scale – for “David Jones Christmas windows” (I’m a Christmas junkie). Google said there were 36 searches last month. I got 4 of them. So 11% from position 1. Small scale, but it’s a niche. (See my Christmas Australia site).

Now the paid tool, whose name I no longer want to mention, said that I should have received 7 searches all year, for “Choosing a dog”. That’s a little different to Google’s figures of 1300/month, and my actual 284 hits.

They have a disclaimer that the figures cannot be comprehensive, and are meant for comparing to other keywords, relatively. Fair enough. But those figures are out by more than an order of magnitude. They’re just misleading for my purposes.

Yep. We are no longer subscribing to that service. The free Google tool has won.

In the past I’ve used an article submitter program that I had bought, but it still ended up being time-consuming, and not showing exemplary results. So this time I thought I would just use the main three or four article directories: isnare, ezinearticles and goarticles.

I created a pen name. Spelled differently, so it was easy to find on Google. Wrote and submitted an article.

Two weeks later I thought I’d search for my pen name on Google. It found 513 references. Pretty darn good.

But paging through the results, I found one reference that had the description wrong. Instead of saying “avid online shopper” and “a huge range”, it said “esurient online shopper” and “Brobdingnagian arrange”, as if they had run it through a thesaurus. No matter, he still provided a link back to my site. Although I’m glad I used a pen name. And hey, it makes it look original to Google, so it’s definitely a benefit to me. Thanks!

More annoying was the cheat who published my article without a link back. A nasty little internetandbusinessestechnique blog. At least he’s unranked.

Searching for a unique phrase from the article brought up three initial results at Google. And if you expand the results list, you get up to 72 links.

The site is currently at page 12, for the main targetted keyword, so it has a long way to go. The original article as it appears on isnare, is at page 11. So that provided a boost.

It’ll be interesting if I can get it up to page one before Christmas. That would be unreal. And financially rewarding.

The logical first step was to search for my own sites. Especially those that rank well at the traditional major search engines.

sydney web design – www.sydney-web-design.com managed page 6 at cuil. Pity they couldn’t find the right web site image to display. Not sure why they displayed ireckon’s instead. Fail.

online shopping australia – gee, it displayed my old domain, best-australian.com, on page 1. Shucks, it even had my own content. Strange though. That content hasn’t existed since November 2007. Is that when they spidered it? The new owner only has crap ads. Fail.

mydogspace – well the .com.au doesn’t get a mention for a few pages. Strange. It’s number 1 at Google. And you’d have to say pretty relevant. Fail.

halloween australia – Cuil displays my sydney-web-design site. Cos I list my halloween site in my portfolio. Pity they didn’t have enough nous to display the actual relevant site. Fail.

Even more annoying is the way the data appears on my screen. I have a modest 17 inch screen. The bottom few rows of Cuil don’t fit on my screen, and I have to page down all the time. And the links to the next search results are so small you miss them at first.

Getting close to epic fail cuil guys.