Search Engine Marketing

Yesterday I was updating my friend's site, Tim Woolley, a racehorse trainer. We run a blog, and have been updating recently with the exploits of Barbaro, who is trained at Fair Hill, where Tim trains.

I was looking at the stats on sitemeter (this is a low trafficed site) and noticed there had been a decent spike recently, specifically from May 5 (date of the Kentucky Derby). I looked at the referrer URLs and noticed pretty much all the traffic was coming directly from the Fair Hill Training Center site. This got me to thinking about how to get the traffic to come directly to Tim's site, rather than via the training center, which I assumed is traffic that had come from a search engine for people looking for information on Fair Hill and Barbaro.

SEO
So I decided to 'practice what we preach' and do some SEO work on the site. Make the title tag more search engine friendly, add approriate meta tags and rephrase the H3 tags to include appropriate keywords. These changes will help with the search engine, but will take time to take effect. We have an opportunity now, as Barbaro continues his triple crown effort. So what to do ?

Search Engine Advertising
So I bid on the keywords (from Google) Fair Hill, Fair Hill Training Center, Barbaro. This program began about 3 pm on sunday afternoon. As of monday, 5:30 AM the advertisement has been served 461 times, with 9 click throughs. Barbaro ad was served 412 times, the remainder evenly split between the other two keywords. Lets see if we can build traffic, and then maintain it by having people come back to continue reading about Barbaro and other training issues the blog covers.