How I made the first page of Google against 33 million competing sites...

[Dana_W]

No, really, how the heck did I do it? I'm still trying to figure it out.

If you search for "press release writer" on Google I am on the first page - The Press Release Site is my site.

Here's what I did:

I used a wordpress blog as a website. I paid someone to SEO it for me. I personally have had great luck with wordpress blogs and SEO.

I regularly wrote blog posts about how to write press releases, how to conduct an online publicity campaign, how to SEO your press release, what to avoid when writing a press release, etc. I tweeted links to those blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. Giving away free, genuinely useful information is my number one tip for getting people to link to your site. Especially if you post lists of links to useful sites on YOUR site - people love lists of resources.

I used to post on here a lot, and I had a link to my site in my signature line on here, which I think is good for SEO.

I am now regularly getting press release clients who found me on Google by searching for the term "press release writer". Oh, that's another thing - I sprinkled the phrase "press release writer" liberally throughout my website/blog.

If anyone else has any ideas as to how I ranked this well, I'm all ears.

[Vijay M]

Congrats Dana.

I just checked and your site was listed #5. Hope you have fortified your servers :-)

Methinks twitter has something to do with it.

[DaveManTheCaveMan]

Just check your number 7 on my computer. 1st page results for 33,400,000.

Who did your seo?

[InternetSuccess001]

Congratulations. I'd say it's a combination of a number of factors. Google is now tracking (the last few months, more explicitly) visitors surfing habits, so basically if someone 'finds' what they are looking for (i.e., it is the last page visited), then you get ranked higher.

So chances are, you happen to have a very good 'landing' page, so clients don't look at 'competitors', then you go up in the ranks.

Also, what you see is not 'necessarily' a true ranking. Google does 'modify' search results based on who you are, etc. However, that being said, you do currently rank #3 from where I am looking on that particular phrase.

Congrats!

[Sup3rskunk]

Thank you for your motivational post and sharing your success story.

The only thing I found a bit misleading is the title, because ...
The number of Google Search results for semi-competitive phrases such as yours, made up of 2, 3 or more words aren't necessarily an estimation in regards to the # of competing sites out there.

Example search phrase: five dog red

This results in 177 Mil results. It would take very little effort to have a site rank on top for the exact term "five dog red", but this doesn't mean that you are out-beating 176.999.999 other sites.

[Dana_W]

Originally Posted by Sup3rskunk

Thank you for your motivational post and sharing your success story.

The only thing I found a bit misleading is the title, because ...
The number of Google Search results for semi-competitive phrases such as yours, made up of 2, 3 or more words aren't necessarily an estimation in regards to the # of competing sites out there.

Example search phrase: five dog red

This results in 177 Mil results. It would take very little effort to have a site rank on top for the exact term "five dog red", but this doesn't mean that you are out-beating 176.999.999 other sites.

That is true enough, although I'm still very happy with my results! Also - "five dog red" isn't going to get me anything useful. There would be more genuine competition for a phrase like "press release writer".

[Dana_W]

Originally Posted by DaveManTheCaveMan

Just check your number 7 on my computer. 1st page results for 33,400,000.

Who did your seo?

I can DM you if you want their name.

ALso - my site is now about 16 months old, so that helps. And I update it regularly, so that also helps.

[Gary King]

Congrats Dana_W.

What kind of traffic increase are you seeing? If it's a new result, it would be interesting to see how your traffic skyrockets (hopefully).

I think what Sup3rskunk was trying to say is that if a phrase doesn't have a lot of searches, it isn't the best situation to be #1. Hoping that's not the case for you - since you say others have found you already, that's awesome!

All success.

Gary
I think what

[Candace07]

Updating your blog regularly can sure do help readers to come back for more

[Melodican]

Quality.... Just shows you, even in a competitive market you can reach the top if you tweak your marketing to a specific niche

Well Done :-)

[FredJones]

Good job. The double-quote search is returning 13k results only though. But still, if you are getting the first page fot the very keyword you desire then nothing can beat that. Congratulations.

[Marhelper]

Congrats! I think it has to do with a little age, daily content updates, twitter visibility, etc.. Awesome!

[greff]

Dana,

To me it is obvious. I suspect your blog is chock full of what a lot of people would consider "great content". Frankly, I've not seen your blog YET (I'll go check it out later) but I've seen you here and other places and I get a warm feeling about your abilities. I think that must be a branding technique? It doesn't have to be a conscious effort to brand, but I think you've done this and somehow the electronic bots sense this as well - as a large accumulation of concise and meaningful content.

I also suspect that you have had your blog up for quite a while. True?

I think people think artificial methods are what it takes. Not so. I have a few websites that dominate Google but I have not done anything special to push them up in the SERPs. Just consistent dripping of on-target content.

Google rewards websites that give the searchers what they are looking for. I doubt you've done any article spinning, for example.

Good job.

[GeorgR.]

you might be able to jump all the way to #1 and #2 with some more off-site SEO and backlinks! Do it

[petelta]

Originally Posted by GeorgR.

you might be able to jump all the way to #1 and #2 with some more off-site SEO and backlinks! Do it

GeorgR is right. It wouldn't take too much. Invest 10% of what you make from the press release site into outsourcing others to backlink for you. It will pay off.

Travis

[greff]

Higher for more backlinks?

Perhaps. The field above you looks a little soft, meaning I don't see a Wikipedia or a major news org. Like George said, give it a try.

[PJ Harmsworth]

Well done Dana....FYI - Here in England, your site is on page 2 of Google. However, when I do a search on google/ncr, your site is on page 1 at no.6...

[Dunder]

I see you at position 6 on page one, with 32million competing sites - good going.

[happymoney8]

Wow, you must be doing something right! Also interesting to know how many searches per month on that exact phrase. According to google keyword tool, there's about 1,600 per month globally.

ps. Appreciate if you can also send me the person who did the SEO work.

[Tajine]

Excellent Dana. Your site is #5 page 1 on Google as of March 6, showing in Australia.

Thanks for your posts.

[Dana_W]

Originally Posted by greff

Dana,

To me it is obvious. I suspect your blog is chock full of what a lot of people would consider "great content". Frankly, I've not seen your blog YET (I'll go check it out later) but I've seen you here and other places and I get a warm feeling about your abilities. I think that must be a branding technique? It doesn't have to be a conscious effort to brand, but I think you've done this and somehow the electronic bots sense this as well - as a large accumulation of concise and meaningful content.

I also suspect that you have had your blog up for quite a while. True?

I think people think artificial methods are what it takes. Not so. I have a few websites that dominate Google but I have not done anything special to push them up in the SERPs. Just consistent dripping of on-target content.

Google rewards websites that give the searchers what they are looking for. I doubt you've done any article spinning, for example.

Good job.

Thanks for the compliments! Since I am a former newspaper reporter, if there is one thing I can do well, it's write - so I filled up my site with a lot of good, relevant writing. I believe that helps with Google's latent semantic indexing. And yes, the site is about a year and a few months old.

[Dana_W]

Originally Posted by PJ Harmsworth

Well done Dana....FYI - Here in England, your site is on page 2 of Google. However, when I do a search on google/ncr, your site is on page 1 at no.6...

Page 2! This is outrageous! No, really, even page 2 is fine with me.

[Andyhenry]

Hi Dana,

I think you know the answer - it's your content and the links of people pointing to it.

Although with that said - you could easily do better.

You have just under 300 incoming links and most of them do not use that keyword phrase in the link - if all your current links had that phrase you'd probably be number 1 already.

So, I'd recommend doing some link building and making sure your phrase is in the link text.

I have a blog that comes up number 1 out of 90million results and not content's not half as good as yours, so do some linking and I think you'll get good results.

I just did 3 press releases this week and paid prweb $360 each for them in order to get decent exposure, but all you need is a little social bookmarking and a video or two to snatch your top spot I think.

Andy

[Private Label Ebook Shop]

Glad to see you active again Dana. Glad to hear all is going well.

Here in Canada I have you at #3 for the term press release writer (without quotes)

Right above you in #2 is a wikihow.com link entitled "Write a Press Release"

When I do the search with the quotes you are ranked at #2

Important to note here as well is, at least here in Canada, is that Google is not listing additional internal pages of your site in the listings. So it should not be too hard to gain additional spots in the listings.

For example my site lists 1, 2, and 9 for the term best choice for ebooks (without quotes) My number 1 listing also has 8 additional links to internal pages of my site that Google determined is relevant. There are 7 million results for the term.

Doing the same search with the quotes shows me at 1 and 2. But also shown are 3 additional results in the top 10 that are directory submission results. There is 229,000 results for the term.

The only promotion I have completed was my own SEO on the site, forum signature links (3 maybe 4 different forums), and scattered directory submissions over the past couple years.

So I am sure if you want to move up the rankings with your keyword you can do it easily. Everyone knows the higher you are listed the more clicks your site is goign to get. But I guess that depends on if you want or can handle the additional work load.

[Dan B Rusu]

Heres where most your link juice is coming from: Craft News Releases to Grow Your Business: Free On-Demand Webinar from PRWeb. Make sure you dont lose that link!

Also, having a 16 month old help ALOT

[siliwangitravel]

well done...good for you my friends

[l3y]

i have site on second spot in google with 41,200.000 competition

and according in google adword keyword tool is searched 201.000 times searched per month.

[jasonmorgan]

Originally Posted by l3y

i have site on second spot in google with 41,200.000 competition

and according in google adword keyword tool is searched 201.000 times searched per month.

Your research is so wrong it's not even funny... try switching that 'broad' search type to 'exact' for starters.

41,200,000 are not competing pages... they the number of pages that have the words 'electric oil' ,or a combination of, someplace on the page... that doesn't mean they are competition.

I have you ranked at #5 and I'm guessing you might be getting 10-20 unique visitors a day.

[unitminer]

BTW: I don't think signature links could help you.... I think they are marked as NOFOLLOW and google doesn't take themas back links !
Try to ask forum administrators how it is exactly...

[l3y]

i think article marketing is so great.

[upgradereality]

Hey, not to burst your bubble but 'press release writer' is only a 880 exact gloabl search phrase in google, thus not very competitive and pretty easy to rank for. Good job though.

[Steven Downward]

Havign lots of good links and updating the site regularly really helps in my opinion. And totally a wordpress blog is a great site to use to do this.
Thanks for sharing this.

[greff]

Nick,

That's the first I ever heard that the ALT tag is strong. Where did you get that info? If true, then, well, hat is off to you!

My info tells me the ALT tag is weak?

[Kev Stevenson]

Well done Dana!

I don't think signature links could help you.... I think they are marked as NOFOLLOW

On this forum the sig links look like dofollow - according to what I see in the source code - someone please correct me if I'm wrong

greff - Doesn't the ALT tag just apply to images? Do we mean the link 'title' tag

I think the fact that your site is being reported as being at different #'s on Google by different posters just shows that we are all looking at different Google datacenters - e.g. in the UK I would be looking at a slightly different version of Google from Our Aussie Mate in an earlier post or possibly even someone else from the UK.
As I understand it, these datacenters share the load and are all at different points in their crawl/index/refresh cycle...

As petelta, andy and others say, there is still room for improvement if you want! I have sites/pages at No1 and I prefer to keep one trick in reserve just in case someone manages to hop above me.

If you do choose to improve, you had better buy a fresh box of pencils to cope with the extra work!

Very Best Wishes!

PS What is Electric Oil??

[greff]

The ALT tag applies to images only. I doubt they have a strong SEO value but I've seen people say that a lot. I just don't agree.

The two tags that are important for Google are the <title> and the <description> tags. The <description> tag will usually be shown on the SERPs to describe what is on that page for the searchers.

[zoobie]

Originally Posted by InternetSuccess001

Congratulations. I'd say it's a combination of a number of factors. Google is now tracking (the last few months, more explicitly) visitors surfing habits, so basically if someone 'finds' what they are looking for (i.e., it is the last page visited), then you get ranked higher.

So chances are, you happen to have a very good 'landing' page, so clients don't look at 'competitors', then you go up in the ranks.

Also, what you see is not 'necessarily' a true ranking. Google does 'modify' search results based on who you are, etc. However, that being said, you do currently rank #3 from where I am looking on that particular phrase.

Congrats!

This is with your account logged in or web history BUT the search results will BE different when you logged OUT!

So it doesn't do any GOOD if your site ranks high with your personal search and NOT
the GENERAL public.

[Daniel McGonagle]

# of competing results doesn't mean much, really but it's also a nice bragging/vanity SERP so well done there

There are folks asking Dana for her SEO person's name even though another poster mentioned that hardly any of the backlinks to this site had anchor text in them for desired keyword!?

Are people truly that clueless about SEO that they still think # of search results matter?

If so, then that's really sad, especially in the SEO section of the WF.

I am truly not trying to be a downer here or take anything away from anybody, but I hate seeing people go down a bad road in SEO ignorance

I could get all 10 spots for that term in 2 weeks and push that domain to page 2 permanently if I wanted to, it's that easy of a term to rank for

[netbank4all]

Hi,

Nice to hear that. But you don't know how to figure out how the heck has happened. The keyword press release writer has 31,200,000 competitors, but if you check the same keyword with in quotes i.e. "press release writer" you will get 14,800 competitors only.

The fact is the same keywords is having by 14800 person in their title tag of the main web page or sub webpage. You can find if you look your title tag of the page. and you may have some SEO promotions, so that your site got page rank for that millions competition keyword.

I think now you have little bit cleared in the piture.

Thanks

[dburk]

Hi Dana,

Congratulations on reaching the first page for your targeted keyword. That looks like a real money keyword.

As far as how you did it, it is the SEO and promoting that did it. As far as competition goes, you didn't have nearly as much competition as your thought. I found exactly 26 pages in Google that are thoroughly optimized for that keyword. Here's how I found that info:

intitle:"press release writer" inurl:"press release writer" intext:"press release writer" inanchor:"press release writer" - Google Search