100 Blog Posts In 100 Days Challenge

The challenge

Day1. This is an experiment to see what effect keeping a daily journal (or as close to daily as I can get) will have on my Google rankings. I was inspired to do this by this blog post by Gareth Mailer

Google says content is king, but how much is that dependent on just plain volume? Or regular refreshing content?

I have kept a blog over the last few years but I have to admit it has been sparse. This is partly due to me just not finding the time to do it and partly to waiting until I have something useful to say.

The plan

So my plan is to have a separate blog on the site ( one of the cool things about the MODX CMS is you can have multiple separate blogs on the same website ) because the different nature of this blog, or journal, is that it is going to be more regular so, probably, by necessity less detailed. But who knows?

What should I measure?

To have a good experiment you need to measure something. You measure it at the start of the experiment and then at the end. Then, when you have finished the experiment, you compare one to the other and try and draw some conclusions.

So what are the things that I could measure?:

What is my current position in Google search for my chosen key words? Well for web design Leeds it's 9th on page 7, and for website design Leeds its 4th on page 6, which frankly, is atrocious!

It has been a lot better in the past usually hovering around the top of page three. But it dropped dramatically when I had a restructure of the site to separate my MODX blogging from my general web development blogging which I thought made more sense as the MODX stuff is a lot more niche and therefore I thought I'd hide it away a bit. But Google didn't like that for some reason. It made me think they like a certain volume of posts in a blog, as that was the main thing that had changed.

Or it could be that my MODX pages are my most popular pages, and the link to them isn't as prominent. I don't know! In fact if you Google MODX Leeds the site comes 7th on page 1, which is probably my best result other than googling the name of the site.

If you google my name Mike Nuttall and Leeds this site comes 4th on page 2.

Well, keeping a daily journal should create some volume after a while so we will see how that works out. As for quality... how can the Google algorithm tell?

So my main objective is to be more visible in Google's search results, and get more users on my site:

A. I will measure that by Googling the following terms at the end of the experiment ( and periodically during it):

1. web design Leeds (today 9th on page 7)
2. website design Leeds (today 4th on page 6)
3. MODX Leeds (today 7th on page 1)
4. Mike Nuttall Leeds (today 4th on page 2)

These are probably the best goal as it's measurable and the search words should occur naturally as I talk about my day to day challenges. We shall see...

So what is twitter saying about this challenge?: