Life… and a Little About Marketing

If it does it’s probably because you use Google to search, and chances are if your here you probably use Google a lot. Usually I shy away from advertising that our company website is listed #1 in Google for Portland Website Design. I’ve always felt that as soon as I mention or post something like that it’s going to be taken away from us. Maybe I’m playing with fire here and maybe I’m not….

While we have maintained our position for Portland Website Design for most of the past couple years, the harder goal to achieve has been to rank better for the other term: Portland Web Design

Results 1 - 10 of about 45,900,000 for portland web design. (0.32 seconds)

Last November 2005 we had made it to the 4th position for ” portland web design ” - then it happened. Google’s December update annihilated us from all of our top 5 positions for our web design & seo website. We weren’t using duplicate content, we always only use www. in all of our links however one could say that some of our content is borderline spammy with heavy keyword usage….

Anyways, after putting minimal SEO efforts into the new target keywords we’ve found out that ranking for Portland Web Design { about 20 million more results than Portland Website Design } is much more difficult. Sure your probably saying to yourself well of course it’s harder. Who uses the word website anyways ? It may not be used as often but those 3 simple words brought a lot of business to Webfu in the last couple years…. After the December update I noticed a lot of local design firms missing from the first page of Google and were newly reacquainted with the third page listed right next to me in the 20 - 30 listings.

Yes it was frustrating. So I didn’t do anything. I didn’t touch our web design website for 2 months. I left it alone entirely. I’d drop in on Google every now and then to see if we were back. Then one day in February 2005 we were back. Like nothing had changed. I felt forgiven by an old friend even though in my opinion we had done nothing wrong to be moved back to the 3rd page. Back for everything including portland website design, portland search engine marketing and portland search engine optimization.

Now today is June 10th, 2006. For the last couple months we’ve been stuck at #12,13 or sometimes even 14 for our new target keywords: Portland Web Design … Then recently { we’ve been working behind the scenes on this } we finally made our move past sightworks, co-laboratory and erikas. BOOM! 5th position all of a sudden. Our search engine optimization efforts are finally working…. then a couple weeks later shuffled back down to #10 and below sightworks. Oh well…. we tried right ?

That’s just the thing about being shuffled that I love. Just when you think your going to be staying at the low spot at #10 { at least its the first page } - you wake up the next morning and BOOM! again BOOM! your back at #5. Damn I hope with all my heart that when you read this we are still ranking well in the top 10 for portland web design. Having said that I feel like I just shot myself in the foot, setting us up for certain disaster by publishing this post and probably being ejected back to the 2nd page…. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

- G