So, here I am writing these blogs, hoping to share information with others about living boss-free and being financially independent…and as of yesterday, Google knew nothing about ShawnMorgan.com. In fact, if you did a search for Shawn Morgan, the top listing that comes up is “Shawn Morgan – A bad boy of comedy.” There is also a Shawn Morgan who is a NFL football player, an NFL Europe Linebacker, and a catfish fisherman. There actually are a ton of Shawn Morgans. I actually do show up on the fourth page for bluearchsolutions.com, my IT consulting company, but that isn’t really what I’m focused on right now.
Obviously, being listed high on Google is very important to driving traffic to your website. Google gets 25% of all traffic on the web, and many people go directly to Google to find anything…I know I do. People use Google to the extreme. For instance, my girlfriend, to go to some site like expedia.com, goes to Google first and types in “Expedia”. So, if I you want to drive traffic to your site, Google seems like a good place to start.
First, I wanted to see if I could get this site to show up on Google if you searched for “Shawn Morgan”. This seems like it should be fairly easy, since I own “shawnmorgan.com” and from what I know, having a domain name with the words in it helps your Google rankings.
But first thing is first, Google needs to know that the site exists. I’ve owned shawnmorgan.com for a long time, and there has been a simple page on the site, but Google has never known it existed. You could search for shawnmorgan.com and it wouldn’t find the site.
So how do we get Google to know about our site? Well, we can submit our site to Google. By going to
http://www.google.com/addurl/, you can submit a site to Google’s indexing service. Google uses a “web spider” that crawls the web and indexes sites. By submitting your site through the addurl application, you can ask the spider to look at your site. The page specifies that you may or may not end up with your site indexed on Google, and it doesn’t specify why or why not. So that was my first step, submitting
http://www.shawnmorgan.com.
Now, after doing this, I immediately went to search for shawnmorgan.com and found that Google still didn’t know about the site. Of course, it will take time to show up, and Google’s addurl page says that it may never show up, so I needed to take more drastic action.
Enter adwords. Adwords is Google’s advertising service. Everyone who has searched Google has seen the “Sponsored Links” sections at the top of the page and down the right side of the page. You have probably also noticed the “Ads by Google” that show up many pages, including this one. Adwords is how you get your site to show up in these sponsored links.
Great, a guaranteed way that I can get my site to show up on Google when someone searches for “Shawn Morgan”, buy ads. I went to
http://adwords.google.com and created an advertisement. When you create an advertisement on Google Adwords, you have to choose the exact search terms that someone should search for to see your ad. Because I wanted my site to show when someone searched for “Shawn Morgan”, I chose these terms.
You then have to pick how much money you want to pay. It really is an auction, you choose how much you want to pay per click, and Google compares how much you want to pay to how much anyone else wants to pay, and that determines your rank (how high you turn up) on their sponsored links. Since I didn’t see anyone else’s ad showing up when you searched for Shawn Morgan, I decided to pay $.01 per click. You can also choose how much you are willing to spend each day or month. I chose that I would pay a maximum of $.25 a day, since my main goal was just to have my site show up, not really to drive traffic to it from the “Shawn Morgan” search.
Once I did this, within a few hours you could do a search for “Shawn Morgan”, and now, my site shows up on Google’s front page!! It is showing up on the right side in the Sponsored Links section, as the only sponsored link.
Of course, this is just the beginning. I’m going to continue to do things that will drive up my site on the Google search pages, and I’ll continue to blog about the things that I do and what has helped most so that you can do the same, and ultimately be Boss-Free!