As a Portland Oregon SEO professional and website designer I decided to do a personal experiment. I already had a business website that was ranked very well on a national level and wanted to see what could be done with a locally geo marketed business website.

Here were the parameters:

1. The new locally marketed website was going to be developed on the Joomla CMS.
2. The new Joomla website was to be developed with good SEO built into the site from the beginning.
3. Once the new website was completed and indexed by the search engines, a reasonable off page SEO campaign would be implemented for developing inbound links.

I was excited about the prospect of pitting my new website up against the best SEO’s and website designers in the Portland Oregon area. What better way was there to gauge my skills as a Search Engine Optimization professional and Website Designer!

I had one thing pitting against me from the beginning; my domain would be a new one. Domain age has a little to do with how your website ranks in the organic search engines, this is common knowledge. This was a factor that lies in the search engine algorithm.

I designed the new website in the Joomla CMS with a moderate amount of original content. I implemented and used good page titles, meta descriptions and utilized the H-tags well. All the images were optimized. The content was well written and was designed for not only the visitors but the search engines were not forgotten about either!

Within one month Google gave this website a PR of 4! For some of the less competitive keyword phrases the site immediately started to rank well. As was expected the more competitive keyword phrases were not ranking well. But that is to be expected with a site only 30 days old. After all this site was competing directly against the other Portland Or Website designer and SEO professionals for those competitive keyword phrases. But I was happy to be awarded a PR of 4 from Google in 30 days. I personally have not ever heard of a website being given a PR of 4 in that short of time.

After 30 days and the new website was well indexed it was time to wind up the off page SEO. A moderate budget of $400.00 was given t the project. The campaign would consist of quality directory listings, blog commenting on blogs that allow a follow. But the most powerful inbound links to have are in content textural links form blog posts pointing to relevant content. These efforts were all implemented.

How this website ranks after 6 months

After 6 months of fine tuning the website and aggressive off page SEO this website now dominates all the keyword phrases that are marketed with this website. Currently it is on the first page of Google for the following keyword phrases, and numerous others as it totally going viral.

1. Portland Oregon SEO
2. Portland Oregon Website Design
3. Portland Oregon Website Designer
4. Portland Oregon Joomla
5. Portland Oregon SEO Training
6. Portland Oregon E-commerce
7. Portland Oregon Internet Marketing
8. Portland Oregon SEO Consulting

This experiment was well worth the effort as it gives me some real-time results for my professional efforts. Off page SEO really is like the icing on the cake when it comes to designing a Business Website that needs to rank well in the organic search engines.