MPC

Over a year ago, I created a static website. My goal was to target a key phrase that I knew was going to be difficult to rank for and it would probably take time. But since I have all the time in the world, I went for it.


When I created the site, I knew jack all about search engine optimization (SEO) and once the site was up, I bombarded it with links using my target key phrase. A year later, I was disappointed that my awstats didn't show a single referral based on that key phrase and I had assumed that it was just too competitive for me to rank. Of course, that was not the case. You can rank for anything. Some key phrase will be harder than others obviously, but to think it's just not possible is wrong.

What happened in this case is I didn't pay any attention to the site after it was up. In fact, it is still not very well optimized. But two months ago, I did go back to editing just the homepage of the site. I know a lot more than I did back then and the first problem I noticed was that this key phrase I was targeting only showed up twice on the page. I also noticed that I was trying to target too many different key phrases without having enough content to back it up.

The quick fix was to drastically trim the keywords I was targeting and to code my page in a way that made my primary key phrase stand out. That means tweaking the title, meta data, and H tags. Then, the last thing was about keyword density. If you want to rank for a key phrase, linking to your page with that term is not enough, the term has to be present multiple times on the page. Don't worry about repetition, just do it. Stick it in there 10 times if you can. Try to be creative in how you insert it so that it doesn't turn off the reader.

The outcome was as follows: Since I already had a bunch of aged links to my site using that key phrase, the effect was fast. During the same month, I started getting referrals on that key phrase. Just two months later, 60% of my entire traffic came from that key phrase alone and my traffic more than doubled. All this from a single key phrase, and more importantly a 5 minute effort to tweak a page that was not properly coded. I now rank on page one in Google for this very competitive key phrase.

There are a few lessons to draw from this experience:

• SEO works and you can't succeed without it
• Coding your pages to match your strategy is MANDATORY to succeed
• If you can do it once, you can do it a million times

That last point is key. I mentioned that 60 percent of my traffic is coming in from a single key phrase (and I'm not even near the top of the Google page). This is actually not a good thing in my opinion. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a great strategy in anything in life. Just ask those fools who invested most of their portfolio in Nortel where stocks plummeted from $40 to $0.40. (A relative of mine lost 40K relatively quickly with this company)

The secret to success is to not reinvent the wheel. It is not essential to think outside the box. What? Did you read this right? Yes: DON'T THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. The condition of course is that you're already in a box that works. If your box is productive, stick with it. Find out what works and repeat the process over and over and over. This is what I intent to do with this website in the long run. I will reapply the process and SEO concepts to target more key phrases and keep driving traffic up.

If you can manage this, then the next thing to focus on is conversion. Someone should blog about that topic