I Love it When a Plan Comes Together
Posted On: 2007-03-16
It's almost as good as having an orgasm
Don't you just love it when a plan comes together? You can think, you can theorize, you can contemplate but when you actually do it and you get the perfect result ... well it's almost as good as an orgasm.
On the other hand I could be displaying signs of having gone totally around the bend. I could be so engrossed in search engine optimization that I'm on the verge of losing touch with reality. Of course, search engines could be reality and everything else could be an illusion and the real world might only exist on page one of the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the terms that really interest you.
So what happened to send me over the edge? Well with just one post in one of our blogs we scored the top spot for an important search term. While that term really isn't all that important on a global scale it's very important and very competitive on a local scale and we want that spot for one of our local clients.
Our client had held that spot for quite some time thanks to a single page on a local directory but they lost it when a new business opened in town and arranged a listing on the local page of a global directory. When our client asked us to build a new website for him he also asked us to do a small amount of site promotion work each month and as part of that promotional work Steve wrote a short piece in one of our blogs targeting that term and linking to our client's site.
Less than 24 hours after writing that piece Steve went back to Google to check on what was happening for the term. We expected to appear somewhere on the first page of the SERPS sometime within a few days of making the post but we really didn't expect to find that we had scored the very top spot ... at least not within 24 hours. But we did.
We've always known that blogs can be very powerful when it comes to hitting the front page of Google for just about any search term. And we've always known that blog entries can hit the front page very quickly but we had thought getting to the front page quickly usually depended on the topicality of the subject.
For example, the first time Steve scored top spot on Google for a popular search term within 24 hours of posting was for a tropical cyclone that was happening at the same time as Steve was posting about it. But we had never thought it possible to hit the top spot so quickly for a term that has been around for a long long time and doesn't have a lot of immediate interest in the way that a tropical cyclone does.
Well now we know differently. We're not sure that it can be done every time but we definitely know that it is possible. It also suggests to us that Google may be looking at that blog of ours in a different light to some other sites. In several columns so far this year I've talked about the trust that Google may bestow on some sites and perhaps that's what we're seeing here.
The proof of that will come later as we do some more linking to the client's site and take some further steps to promote the site for a fairly tight range of keywords that have a lot of local significance and are competitive here in the local area.
But whether Google has a lot of trust in that blog or not there is still proof that a blog can be a powerful tool in hitting the top spots in Google. The blog that got us to the top of that particular SERP has been around for over 12 months now. It has always been aimed at the local area and has always focused on a very tight range of locally important keywords. For some of those keywords we're even beating the commercial competition.
So if you want to start hitting some important keywords to promote your sponsors, or business or your clients, then start a blog. Choose your keywords and keyword phrases before you start and keep your focus on those keywords. Include the keywords in the title of your blog. If you set up your blog as a sub-directory of one of your sites then use the most important keyword or keyword phrase in the file name of your blog too.
For example don't just call the directory ‘blog' because then it will appear as http://mydomainname.com/blog. Instead use something like http://mydomainname.com/bisexual-porn/
Make sure you post regularly and several times a day is far better than posting several times a week. Make sure that your posts go up at different times through the day instead of writing four entries and posting them all at once. Ensure that the blog software you're using allows you to ping Google every time you make a post and ensure that every post contains at least one of your keywords or keyword phrases.
You don't have to jam every one of your targeted keywords into every one of your posts and you don't have to stuff those keywords or keyword phrases into ever single sentence and/or paragraph in you post. Instead, work them in naturally and try and fit them into the title of the post too ... but just be sure to do it naturally.
Finally, don't look for success overnight. Steve's been working on that blog for over 12 months and the initial success with the tropical cyclone only happened after about six months of work. It's only now that he's really beginning to achieve those top spots that he wanted right from the start and so it's probably going to take you just as long.
Now that may sound like a lot of hard work for no instant return at all but then we think it's worth it. There's nothing like nailing an important keyword in less than 24 hours.
Well almost nothing ... maybe an orgasm's better.