SEO first attempt - Im very excited :)

Hi all. This is my first post here but iv been a guest here for a little while.

I know it is best to start of small, but I feel i've bitten of a huge chunk for my first project.

The key word I want to target is Best Iphone 5 Cases. I did not target Iphone 5 cases as this would be a mammoth task.

I am going to go through step by step on what I have done so far - ask for you input - and keep you all upto date on how it goes. I have at least a few months to solidify my site at the top and possibly branch out for a few more keywords.

Step 1. - Research!

I've read it a million times - your initial keyword research is the most important part of the process. I dont have any fancy tool for this, just the free google Keywords Tool.

I did a search for Iphone 4 cases - almost 250,000 'exact' searches a month. Now if I was ambitious I may have tried to target that key word - but lets be honest, this is my first project.

'Iphone 4 covers' seemed temping with almost 15,000 'exact' searches a month, but again I thought I could be setting myself up for disappointment.

After alot of thought I came to the conclusion that 'best iphone 5 cases' would be a great starting point. Through my research, 'best iphone 4 cases' have an 'exact' search of 8,000 a month, and google Keyword Tools marks it as Medium Competition.

After reading quite a few articles on how many clicks I could receive being at the No.1 position on google, I estimated that I would get around 4,000 visitors a month. If my site then converted 10% of these into sales (it is quite a high conversion rate as I think 'best iphone 5 cases' is a buying keyword. People are likely to be looking to buy the best cases) I would now be looking at 400 sales a month. With the average case around $35 and an average affiliate getting 15% ie $5.25, I predict the site, for that keyword along could be making around $2,100 a month. I decided I would go for it.

Step 2. - Action

I headed over to purchase my domain name. Again from what I have read on here, its important to have your keyword within the domain name so I went for best-iphone5cases [dot] come

I quickly set up a Wordpress site and installed the following plugins:

- All in one seo pack
- Easy Google Analytics for Wordpress
- Seo Meta Tags
- Simple Google Sitemap XML

I also headed over to google and registered the site for Webmaster tools and submitted the site map.. and to google analytics and linked it to my account.

So now I have a site ready to go, with a great domain and all the On-page SEO ready - now I needed content. I headed over to Fiverr and found a great writer who I paid to create 5 unique articles - each based on a different aspect of the iphone 5, but all linked to cases.

Once completed I uploaded them to the site and BAM.. I now have a fully optimized site ready to be indexed and start ranking.

Again I headed over to Fiverr and bought 2 gigs - one was to submit my site to a few social links to get it indexed and the other was 70 high PR links. In the meantime I downloaded Market Samuri and began using the SEO competition tool to check out the backlinks some of my competition had - and obviously get the same! For the next few days I went through each site in the top 10 for 'best iphone 5 cases' 'best iphone 4 cases' 'iphone 4 cases' and 'iphone 5 cases' and used the same links on my site (not all of them, but PR 2 and above). I again headed back to Fiverr and purchased around 7 more gigs - all to build backlinks to my site - now from what I've read it is unsafe to add a ton of backlinks to a site straight away, but I intend on letting the links be found naturally and not to ping anything - this way once I have purchased a few gigs, the links will continue to be found for a few months.

So this is basically my journey so far.. Currently my rankings look like this:

'Best iphone 5 cases' - (best iphone 4 cases - 8,000 searches a month)

1. A hubpages.com article
2. Videos from youtube
3. techradar.com - an article regarding iphone 4 batteries???
4. iphone5casetore.com
5. ME!!!!!

'Iphone 5 cases' - (iphone 4 cases - 250,000 searches a month)

I am currently on page 4, 5th from the top.

I have managed to create all of this, and achieve these results in 12 days - that is when the domain was registered.

I look forward to your questions, advice, and general comments on what I have achieved so far - is it good, can I expect my site to move further, would you have done anything differently, have I missed out some obvious step... etc.

I will be looking to update this post on a regular basis with how the site is doing for both keywords.

Thanks, Adam