Google searches on Adam Arnold – a very short history

When I founded SmarterHousing in 2005 I maintained a warwick.ac.uk blog and quickly learned that .ac.uk domains do particularly well in search engines and you can still find my post commenting on this discovery! Indirectly, I had optimised my name and you could find my Warwick blogs profile page in the top 3 Google results for searches on ‘Adam Arnold’.

I didn’t give this a second thought until the latter part of 2008, when I learned my name would be published in The Guardian and referenced on Venture Navigator, an online resource and social network for entrepreneurs. I was in for a small shock upon opening Google – no trace of me for at least 4 pages: and that was a hugely out of date entry on Warwick blogs.

At the same time I was getting to grips with blogging in general and had an active account on blogspot (1entrepreneur). On sound advice from Andrew Clarke, Technical Director at SmarterHousing, I had been looking into WordPress and the famous 5 minute install. My timing on this was somewhat fortunate as with a little head scratching I was able to install WordPress to ceo.smartergroup.biz and migrated my early entries from blogspot.

A combination of the fact Google likes new websites and the techniques I’m about to mention helped me to attain #1 spot for searches arising from press coverage – the aforementioned ‘adam arnold courvoisier’ and ‘adam arnold smarter group’. These searches are very narrow and have far fewer results than searches for ‘Adam Arnold’, and the respective #1 spots represent only a partial success.

Google searches on Adam Arnold – THE STARTING POINT

As of March 2009 Google.com searches for ‘Adam Arnold’ show the following:

Page 1 reference on YouNoodle & Make Your Mark

Unfortunately ceo.smartergroup.biz doesn’t show up until Page 6.

This position has been achieved naturally, through regular updates to ceo.smartergroup.biz since the last quarter of 2008. My earlier post on WordPress plugins is still up to date and I think the combination of SEO, sitemap and robots.txt plugins give any site a good starting point if natural search traffic is desired.

Sitemap/robots.txt provide search engines with an index of your site so their respective bots can navigate through your content, whilst the SEO plugin provides a structure for entering keywords, tags and a short summary to be shown under the page link in SERPs. It should be noted I manually registered the sitemap.xml with Google Webmaster Tools once it had been generated.

Related searches on Adam Arnold

ceo.smartergroup.biz achieves a #1 ranking for the searches ‘Adam Arnold CEO’, ‘Smarter CEO’ and ‘Encounters of an Entrepreneur’ (the heading for my blog entries).

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