As we talk about how to create a blog understanding SEO or search engine results is very important. To help illustrate some of the concepts I thought we would do a case study using one of the blogs we help called Evangelism Software. The Evangelism Software | Ministry Software blog has been on page 1 in position 1 or 2 for the last month as a Google return for the keywords “Evangelism Software”. That changed 2 days ago as a couple of new sites jumped ahead in the search results. Here are the search results as of today.

You can see that the site we are working with, Evangelism Software | Ministry Software has dropped down to position 5. Let’s look at the sites that jumped ahead on the results. The first site is shown below.

This site is set up with a couple of free program offers and Google Adsense in the heart of the page. This return is a page from a much larger site. The main site has a page rank of 6 and over 29000 links. That is a lot of links. There really isn’t much useful information on the site. It exists to display Google Adsense. Don’t get me wrong, the Adsesne program is a good thing, but it shouldn’t be the only reason a site exists.

The second site is another page from that same big site.

Again this page exists to get people to click on the Adsense ads. The third result is an actual site talking about evangelism.

Until a couple of days ago this site used to trade 1st and 2nd position with the site we work with. Showing up in position 4 we have

This return is kind of off topic but comes from a site with a lot of authority. The site we work with is now at position 5

This site provides some useful information about using free software to set up blogs for evangelism. You will notice that there is also Adsense on the site but it is not the sole purpose for the site. Evangelism Software has a lot of good things going for it to return a good result from Google. Working against it is that it hasn’t been around very long. This is all part of the deal with setting up blogs. It is possible that the sites that have just jumped into the top spots will move back down the page because they don’t offer much. In the meantime, Evangelism Software will have to make sure it keeps posting fresh content if it wants to move back up. The reality is, though, that even at the number one spot there is not much traffic for this keyword. For the month or so the site was ranked # 1 it only got 1 visit from the keyword search. I think that the sites that are just set up for Adsense clicks are going to be disappointed. My visit might be all they get.