So — the exper­i­ment worked. I’m now second on any Google search for Halton Bath­rooms. And front page for Widnes and Run­corn Bath­room searches.

So what does this mean? Well it shows the power of a:having what’s con­sidered a trus­ted site with no spam, a long his­tory, and plenty of con­tent and b:the bene­fit of struc­tur­ing things cor­rectly. It also shows that for sur­pris­ingly large niches there’s still plenty of organic SEO capa­city available.

Ok, now you may well be ask­ing what on earth this is about. Why would I be writ­ing about Halton Bath­rooms on a blog that’s mostly devoted to my motor­s­port and travel stories?

Well, it’s an exper­i­ment. There’s actu­ally a com­pany in the area called Halton Bath­rooms and Kit­chens. Jolly nice bunch they are too — in fact, they did my bath­room. But it’s not really about them. It’s about see­ing what the search engines think about my website.

WordPress.com and the bad­min­ton club

Basic­ally it all star­ted a couple of weeks ago when I helped a bad­min­ton club which I play with some­times to get them­selves a web­site. They don’t have much money, so I sug­ges­ted a free­bie site with WordPress.com, and off they went. Simple, free, and quick to do. I also wrote a quick fea­ture about it on this site, in order to pro­mote their activ­it­ies a little and to get the search engines to pick up the link.

And that’s where it gets weird. Try search­ing for Halton Bad­min­ton on Google (you can just click that link there) and this site comes up top at the moment. The WordPress.com site comes nowhere.

So what’ll hap­pen if you search for Halton Bath­rooms soon? Will you find their site, or this one first? Where will I come on the list­ings? What about Widnes Bath­rooms? Or Run­corn Bathrooms?

It’s actu­ally, I guess, an exer­cise in how a web­site becomes import­ant. This one’s been going for years, is well struc­tured, and prob­ably has hun­dreds of qual­ity links com­ing in — includ­ing two from Wiki­pe­dia. And given that my job is run­ning a web design com­pany over in Liv­er­pool (well I might as well link that too!) I and my col­league James should know a thing or two about how to make a page get picked up by the search engines.

I’ll post a little more in here, on this post, in about a week when I know what Google’s done to it. If it has, I can see quite a few tech­no­lo­gical asides about things we’re try­ing to do appear­ing in here.

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