Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I was so glad to hear that Brennan Hawkins was found alive and well. It seems like all too often those types of missing child stories don't have such a happy ending. Congratulations to the Hawkins family and to Brennan for surviving and making it home!

An interesting side note related to search engine marketing, I noticed a website, findbrennan.org, which shows up #1 in Google for "Brennan Hawkins" Below that site are mostly relevant news articles from the local and national media.

The interesting thing is that that domain name was just registered on June 18th--obviously sometime soon after Brennan had gone missing. Three days later the site is not only indexed by Google, but it is showing up in the #1 spot. Granted, there's probably not a lot of competition for Brennan's name, but it still goes to show you how quickly a website can show up under certain circumstances. I noticed several links to that site from various news articles, which undoubtably played a major part in the site being noticed and ranked where it is. The FindBrennan.org site was linked from the homepage of nearly all the local news media and even some national media. It goes to show you what high quality links can do for a site in a very short period of time.

The domain was registered (and presumably set up and run) by Jesse Fisher of WebPromo in Salem, Utah. I don't know if he knew the family or just volunteered to help with the website. All the exposure the site's gotten might benefit Jesse in some way, but I don't think that was necessarily the intention of the site. It was clearly built as a useful means of communication regarding the status of the search for Brennan. Now that the search for Brennan is over, what will come of the site? Who knows, but thank goodness he was found!