Internet Marketing Case Study - Mad About Madrid

This brief case study aims to give you an idea of how some of the tools, talked about on this blog, can be used to help boost search engine rankings for your site. Mad About Madrid is another Web site, in blog format, that I run. The site is designed to give travellers to Madrid useful tips and a wide range of information for their stay in the city. The site was launched around 3/4 months ago.

Step 1 – Originally, visitors to the site arrived to the http://madrid.blogs.com URL (type this in and you still arrive to the site). My feeling was that people may be put off by visiting a site which was as a sub-domain of another site. I won’t go into the details of domain name mapping but suffice to say that all pages of the site now come under www.madaboutmadrid.com and not http://madrid.blogs.com.

Step 2 – The code behind this, and every TypePad, blog means that every article that I write becomes a page title. This gives bloggers a great opportunity to construct headlines which can be used to get you better rankings in search engines. A good example of this comes from a recent article that I wrote about the musical ‘Cats’ which begins in Madrid on 17th December. Within 2 days of Google spidering my site, I was getting around 20-30 referrals from people who had typed “Cats Madrid”, “Cats musical Madrid”, or similar variations. I use the Google and Overture suggestion tools to find out the most appropriate words for my headlines.

Step 3 – Every article is listed under a category name, displayed on the left-hand side of the page, which in turn is picked up by the search engines. In addition, every category has its own page title which is another opportunity to be picked up on the search engines. Type in “Madrid restaurants” on Google and you will find the “Mad About Madrid: Madrid Restaurants Archives” page listed in the top 10.

Step 4 – Internal Links. Blogs by their very nature are designed to move people either around your site, through hyperlinks, or off your site. Mad About Madrid offers an equal balance of both and can direct people to articles of interest within the site through “Related Links” or off the site through straightforward hypertext links.

Step 5 – The Mad About Madrid site has identified a number of forums, bulletin boards and blogs where comments and advice can be left. The idea is not to ‘spam’ someone else’s Web site but to add value to it, through offering good advice. The idea being that the person in receipt of your opinion will think, “yes, that is good advice, what does this person’s site look like?”

Step 6 – Start making sure that you get listed on relevant directories and Web sites. Someone found the Mad About Madrid site through typing in “language schools Madrid” and asked for a link to their site – Intercambios España, this has now resulted in targeted referrals from this site. I have also got listings on Spanish Web directories and even the About.com directory.

Results
1. The site has a Google Page rank fo 4/10 - up from 3/10 last month.
2. Around 200 visitors come to the site every day and view roughly 400-500 pages.
3. The number of pages listed on Google seems to increase every 2 to 3 days. Admittedly, articles are submitted every day or 2 days. Currently the site has 93 pages listed on Google and is making inroads on other search engines.
4. The site can be found on a very broad range of keywords and every page acts as an access point, depending on the search words. Today, "cats madrid", "madrid history", "madrid restaurants" and "plaza santa ana" are the top search terms. This could change tomorrow, depending on the article I write next.
5. The site has a growing number of forums, blogs, directories and other sites which refer people into to it. Many of them are not listed on Google.