Look at these two charts comparing January 2011 to January 2012. If you make the mistake of measuring your growth from the beginning of each month till the end, it’s hard to see any increase. However, if you’re patient for a year the growth becomes quite apparent.

It should run on any typically configured PHP hosting environment

See it in action at Auto Glass Guru

Get the zip download at our site. A Github repository is now available

(1)   Create profiles for your company on websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. Remember that it is important to show activity on these websites to get them to rank. Just creating them isn’t enough. Post something regularly, build a few links to them, and watch each profile page rise in the search engines. Below are a number of websites you can create profiles on. Each one of these rank extremely well.

1. Twitter.com
2. Linkedin.com
3. Facebook.com
4. Digg.com
5. WordPress.com
6. Google.com/profiles
7. Quora.com
8. About.me
9. Formspring.me

(2)  Buy other domains such as websitenamereviews.com, websitenametestimonials.com, and websitenamecomplaints.com. We recommend looking at Google suggestions to start. These days keyword rich domains rank extremely well. Your $8 purchase will be well worth it.

Remember that negative comments added to powerful domains like pissedconsumer.com can rank for your business name extremely fast. Being proactive about your online reputation can minimize the impact of one unhappy client’s comment.

Attn Bailey, Trevor

This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your search engine registration for COSMETICSURGEONNORTHCAROLINA.COM.

Failure to complete your search engine registration by Jan 26, 2011 may result in the cancellation of this offer (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).

Your registration includes search engine submission for COSMETICSURGEONNORTHCAROLINA.COM for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by Jan 26, 2011. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register COSMETICSURGEONNORTHCAROLINA.COM for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.

The email points to this link – which is clearly an invoice.

The domain is registered to:

Mark Denaro
RG
200 Park Avenue South
New York
NY
10003
US
Phone: +1.13474605327

Which I’m guessing is a faked registration as the number format appears to be invalid. Fortunately Google provides some good advice on how to steer clear of these scams. From the Official Google Blog:

How to identify scams and other schemes

In general, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Here are some pointers on what to look out for:

• Before you fill out a form or give someone a credit card, do a web search to see what other people are saying about the company and its practices.
• Be wary of companies that ask for upfront charges for services that Google actually offers for free. Check out our business solutions page before writing a check.
• Always read the fine print. Watch out for get-rich-quick schemes that charge a very low initial fee before sneaking in large reoccurring charges on your credit card or bank account.
• Google never guarantees top placement in search results or AdWords — beware of companies that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a special relationship with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Sitemaps program — you can do these tasks yourself at no cost whatsoever.

While this has been good for promoting more awkwardly-phrased domains, it appears it no longer holds water.

Compare, for example “arizona seo” and “seo arizona”. While we conquered them both, notice how the lower listings are completely in different orders.

This is significant for two reasons:

1) In many niches, fundamentally, owning the No. 1 spot permanently is not going to happen. You may not be able to outcompete a national brand with a $20 million website budget. However, getting second, third, or even sixth position results are a major coup. So it’s vital to see the trends in those middle ranks.

2) If the two searches DO deliver discrete results, it becomes paramount to figure out the more desirable phrase. Yeah, you got No. 4 for “bakery phoenix” but everyone wanted “phoenix bakery”. This is especially true in the geo-targeted niche. While many multi-word searches have a natural order (adjective-noun, for example), regional searches can go either “city first” or “keyword first”, depending on what is seen as natural.

However, it’s not as simple as “let’s target one search variant”. Creating a natural rankings profile means you have to balance between all the variants, ideally expending labour correlating to the rewards they can offer. If you try to do your own link-building, or use some of the more popular link-spam services, you’ll end up over-targeting the ‘magic’ phrase and end up looking fake. And Google hates fake.

How can we help? We do the research and crunch the numbers, so your links are built in a reasonable proportion and in an organic style. Our atmosphere of accountability ensures that you get the links you need, not just the snap judgement link you thought would catapult you to the top.

While it’s often seen as a grand investment strategy– building a portfolio of names and holding them for sale, it’s actually a very weak strategy.

First, your revenue angles are limited. Yes, there are some new ‘Parking Plus’ concepts, like throwing out an affiliate-based store, or slapping a canned forum or wiki onto your dead domain to give it a life, but these often mean handing over a huge cut of an already small revenue stream to the development service. Beyond that, there’s little more than selecting different parking services and hoping that you can find one which generates $8.95 per year to cover the renewal costs.

That’s the sad fact of domaining: most of your portfolio is going to barely cover expenses; if you’re lucky, once a year, explodinghamsters.com will pay for a curry dinner when parked.

Second, you can never enter the search game. Even if you develop a brilliant site atop your parking provider’s toolkit, you will have obvious fingerprints. Your nameservers will be those of the parking firm; the underlying software’s basic nature will be visible. Hell, even the template structure will be obviously betraying that you didn’t own your site. In addition, these sites rarely, if ever, have a high-quality link profile, so even if there aren’t inherent penalties to the site, it won’t meet the search engines’ quality estimates.

Third, you’re generally taking a passive approach to marketing. I note this is especially true with owners of specific types of domains. If you bought a hundred domain names solely because they’re four-letter-long “brandable” .com domains, you can’t really go out there. All you can do is hope someone invents a product, names it something you own the domain for, and will pay premium money because he didn’t do his homework before running the $200,000 media campaign.

Yes, the ‘invented name’ only applies to some domainers, but frequently, those people who have keyword-rich domains, are pursuing a mechanical approach of whatever name has the most exact-match searches on Google, or the highest pay-per-click estimates. Ironically, it’s a strategy which makes you focused on the very search engine who doesn’t want you to rank at all. Naivete is also a factor: will you be able to provide a message on your exact-match domain that will register enough to get that paid click, or just trigger the big-blue-back-button?

So how can you do better? Invest in a complete property. Build a site with fresh content, rather than a parking page, and connect it to a comprehensive link-building campaign. With such a setup, you have an asset– not just a site– one which will draw real search rankings and traffic, and which can potentially be sold to a further user. Yes, it’s a long-term strategy, but one which can pay out much more than a 96-cent monthly parking commission.