We’ve put a variety of topics in here about all sorts of things that interest us, but at the back of our minds it’s also been a little experiment. If we write a post, how long will it take for a Google search to bring us up as a result? How can we use this to pro-actively market ourselves?

The trick is to write about things that you think potential customers will search for, hopefully meaning that they will see your post in their Google search results and potentially consider using you for their project. Here’s a list of our top ten search engine hits so far, in no particular order – and all from posts within this blog. We’ve included the ranking in Google out of the total number of returned results.

Bear with me on this one, and read right through to the last result, which we think is quite staggering!

• “Vive la Tour”
  Position 7 out of 4,630,000

• “Dragging the shutter”
  Position 11 out of 388,000

• “Nikon 85mm f1.8″
  Position 10 out of 577,000

• “Building up contacts”
  Position 4 out of 273,000,000

• “Should I sell online?”
  Position 6 out of 128,000,000

• “Free high res desktop wallpaper”
  Position 9 out of 597,000

• “Reasons for being standards compliant”
  Position 6 out of 9,330,000

• “Photographer portfolio online”
  Position 9 out of 10,400,000

• “The myth of the fold”
  Position 25 out of 175,000

And finally, our personal favourite:

• “Is size really that important?”
  Position 1 out of 108,000,000!

So, naturally at the end of this our top tip is to start writing a blog and link from your blog to your main website! We’d recommend having the blog on the same url as your website, for example our blog address is www.elmnet.co.uk/blog, rather than www.elmnetblog.co.uk.

The reason for this is that although having external links to your site is a good thing, the value of each of these links subsequently decreases if they are all from the same url. If you have ten links from your blog to your main site then every link counted after the first link is worth considerably less in Googles view.

It therefore makes sense to write good, search engine friendly copy, and then to host this on your main website domain and let other sites link to you because your content is interesting. This means that you now have many more inbound links from different sites all pointing to your domain, and Google can’t get enough of that!

We thought we would try a little experiment! We’ll write a new blog post based on the most interesting idea suggested to us, and in one month’s time we’ll see how it does when a Google search on the subject is performed.

You can suggest a topic by leaving a comment, dropping us an email, or  via twitter.