In November 2005, my wife and I decided to build an on-line shop to sell gift baskets and roses to the Australian market. I set about researching how best to establish a website and my wife designed gift baskets and sourced products. What we did not know at this stage was just how we would promote the site!



The new site launced 1 January 2006 and I began thinking about how best to promote the site. This is when the learning really began for me. The first lesson was just how costly pay-per-click advertising would be and that to effectively promote the website for organic search (ie position well in search engines for chosen keywords) should be a consideration before building the site. I had already made the first mistake made by so many web site designers, I designed the site without considering search engine optimisation, or SEO.

Nevertheless I had to plough on. I read as much as I could on the topic of SEO from experts on-line and bought a book so that I could read in those times whemn not at my PC. Here I learned many other lessons and began making incremental changes to my site as I learned. By end of February we were spending a fortune on advertising (biggest expense by far) and I was beginning to make progress in the search engines; I was on first page for MSN and second in Yahoo but nowhere in site with Google (like the pun?).

This is when the grind began. I continiuosly worked on the site and "off-page" optimisation techniques and managed to get the site to the top of page 1 on both Yahoo and MSN by end of March (positions #2 and #1 respectively). Google was nowhere to be found! What was going on?

Many SEO practitioners talk of the Google sandbox. This is alleged to occur for new websites only. Apparently Google quarantines the new website until it is proven. When I learned of this I was so frustrated that I decided to ignore Google and focus on the other search engines. This protest lasted only a few weeks as I could see that Google was the most popular search engine in Australia and the adwords campaigns were still burning our hip pocket.

I then focussed a month's effort solely on building off-page optimisation strategies for my site (which Google apparently prefers) and at the end of August my site suddently appreared on about page 6. This was encouraging.

For the next three months I persisited. No matter how hard I tried, the site never seemed to do better than page 3 or 4.

In November my wife and I learned that we are not cut out to run business operations. We both love creating businesses and building them but the day-to-day operation requires a different motivation and a discipline that we did not have. So we decided to sell while the business was growing.

We sold the business and the new owner took posession on 1 December; and then it happened! You would not believe it. On the day the business sold, literally that very day, a search on Google for the most common keyword (gift baskets) listed our website (well not exactly ours anymore) website on page 1 in position 4!!!! I couldn't believe it! My emotions swayed between the exhiliration experienced with victory (at last) and frustration that we would not benefit from the obvious increase in traffic this would drive to our site.

It is a month since we sold now and I have come to an important realisation. SEO is for competitive people. If you like winning and are determined to win at all costs then SEO is for you.

Finally, give yourself a head start by designing new websites with SEO in mind. I have built several sites since and been successful in the search engines very quikly; even with Google!