First page ranking

This article should make a fine addition to the Article Marketing Case Study website. I decided to write the article after experiencing some pretty good results during the first month of this website’s existence. I wanted to share those results publicly. The results I am referring to are that I managed to actually get the homepage to rank on page one in Google for both its primary and secondary keywords in under one month from the first day this site was launched.

SEO Result

If you have a lot of experience optimizing websites for search engines, then you realized that the domain authority of existing competitor websites can be very difficult thing for a new website to overcome. Even when your page is more directly relevant to what the searcher is looking for, it is still incredibly difficult to overcome that existing ranking power that your older more developed competing websites have acquired over the years. They might not have any external links pointing to their page at all, and yet they get excellent rankings for those pages. When you see that happen, more times than not, it is because those websites have so much internal link juice stored up.

If you were to compete with some of these websites head to head, by using article marketing alone, you would literally have to publish hundreds of articles at somewhat decent websites in order to generate enough of that kind of authority for your website. Yes, it really can take a lot of power.

That is why I was pleasantly surprised to see the website pop up to position 8 on the first page in Google. At least that is where it ranks right now as of the time I am writing this. It has been at position 8 or nine pretty consistently. I was hesitant to write this post because the site could just as easily move downward again in the ranking. That would be an embarrassment. Oh well. That is a chance I am going to take.

This site is a pretty simple site that so far only has about twelve pages in total. This post will make thirteen. And that is if you include the about page. It is a pretty simple site that doesn’t have enough pages on it to really give it that much self-generated internal link power. The ranking power for this site is going to come primarily from the links in the articles that I published all over the internet to promote this site. So far there has only been about fifteen articles actually published to promote this site. Thirteen have come from article directory style websites like GoArticles.com and EzineArticles.com. Two of them have come from blog style web 2.0 sites like WordPress.com and Blog.com.

I think those are pretty darn impressive results for only that many articles.

If you know how to analyse competition for SEO then you know what I mean. These keywords that I am competing for here are not pieces of cake. They have pretty decent competition, especially on page one. I am convinced that moving up to the top three positions is going to be much more difficult. It will probably tale a whole lot more articles published at other websites and also a lot more published on this site itself. That way, I have more external ranking power and internal ranking power that will combine to give me the results I seek. I am not sure how long that would take thought and if it is ultimately even worth it. I will be playing that one by ear and making decision as time passes.

It is important to note, that while publishing articles at those other websites to promote this one, I didn’t just link back to the homepage for this site using the ideal anchor text. I only linked to the homepage a few times and I don’t know if any of them used the perfect anchor text or not. I am a firm believer in using the ideal anchor text primarily from within your own website. Look at how this blog is structured. That is why you see that link at the top of every page, in the header, that points back to the homepage using one of the phrases I want to rank for. By the way, in case you are wondering about those target keywords, just read the homepage of this site. I explain the entire study and the guidelines for it on there.

All in all, I was able to muster a pretty good amount of link juice from the pages on this website itself as well as the fifteen inks that points back to the various pages here. Wouldn’t it be worth publishing fifteen articles to get your website onto page one in search results for your intended keywords?

Every single page on this website as well as every single article that I published elsewhere to promote this website was a one hundred percent unique article that was written by me or a freelance ‘writer. The vast majority of the articles are pretty good reads. You might learn a little bit by reading them. I consider that style of article marketing to be high quality article marketing. In my opinion we would all be better off if everyone did that instead of using some kind of semi-automated software for generating articles.

So, the formula was pretty simple for this task so far. I wrote and published ten articles on this website. I linked back to the homepage from every single page on my site. And I used the ideal anchor text for those links by using one of the phrases I wanted to rank for. I then published about fifteen articles at various dofollow article directories and blog style Web 2.0 sites. Each of those articles links back to some article here on this website. I chose each of those article publication sites because they are all places that a typical person could publish articles to promote their own website. I made sure every page on my website made it into Google’s index. Because the articles are unique and well written, in my opinion, I expect them to stay indexed in Google indefinitely.

I first launched the site on 9/22/11. As of today, it is 10/19/11. That is less than one month. The site has been ranking on page one now for about four days. Hopefully it stays there or moves higher from here. I urge you to follow the study by bookmarking the homepage. Refer back to it from time to time to see where it is ranking. I intend to share a lot more of the details for how and what is happening as it unfolds. By following this story you will learn a great deal of information that can be applied to your own business.

You can read more about what happened on the page where I talk about whether article marketing can get your website penalized.

Update as of 12-15-11: The site popped back to page one ranking. I am not sure what happened that caused it to be demoted for a couple weeks. Let’s see if the good ranking sticks or not.

Update as of 12-15-11: The site popped back to page one ranking. I am not sure what happened that caused it to be demoted for a couple weeks. Let’s see if the good ranking sticks or not.

Update as of 1-10-12: This website now ranks number one in Google for both targeted keyword phrases. I also had a double listing at the very top of Google at the time I am writing this.

Don’t forget to share these articles with your friends as well. If you found this information interesting, then your friends are going to Digg it too.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *