A few months ago I decided to run my five-year old business as a full time endeavor. Prior to that I only did work through Aligned Marketing for previous employers or close friends. Since my field is marketing and the web is the new promised-land for marketers, I knew I had to do something about my website (www.aligned-marketing.com). The first step, as always, is to define my current situation.

At the time my site was ranked 4,120,000+/- on Alexa (www.alexa.com). That's not very good but in a world with over 100M websites, it's not  bad. As I thought and planned I was fortunate to sign a major client. I'll leave the name out but describe the company. They are an industrial company with about $50M in sales that has been in existence for almost 40 years. They have one of the better websites in the industrial space. The industrial space, by the way, includes companies such as Snap-on, Stanley Tools, 3M, and others that are familiar names to most people but are not known for cutting-edge marketing or websites.

While conducting research I learned that my new client's site was ranked 1.42M by Alexa. Obviously that's a much higher ranking than mine but I was encouraged by the fact that such a well regarded company, with a long history of success, and my piss-ant company's site were in the same ballpark, the millions in site rankings. Also, I knew I could improve my ranking by doing some Average Joe SEO, which I did.

Fast forward to now. My site is ranked 502K now. No, I'm not threatening Google for #1, but to rank in the top 500K of the world with just some home-grown tactics, in less than six months, is an accomplishment. It was done with virtually none of the advanced tactics used by SEO experts. I just wanted to see what I could do without spending money. My little experiment seemed to work. I blogged and was active on social sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Probably 70%-80% of my actions can be done by anyone. Ok, so now what?

I think I'll kick it up a notch. I'm going to hire myself for SEO. I'm going to do the full treatment on my keywords, tagging, directory submissions for both my site and blogs, some PR, attach ALT descriptions to my images, conduct my social media activities in a more formal manner and several other tricks of the trade. I want to get my site ranked n the top 250,000 of the world. I'll let you know how it works out.

Steve