How I got Page 1 results for "Wordpress 3 review" with 1 article and 1 forum post
- SEO |
My keyword research showed me that along with "wordpress 3 review" people would be searching for "wp template", "wordpress template", and "wordpress cms". I was skeptical about ranking for the template terms, but hopeful for CMS. Here's what I did and how it worked out.
Onpage SEO (opseo magic)
The review can be found both on WF and EZA, in slightly different forms. I submitted on EZA several days ahead, though they appeared the same day (EZA, of course, is curated). The EZA version is about 800 words. There are some moderately subtle onpage SEO techniques used. An obvious one is the title, which manages to include both "Wordpress" and "CMS" twice. Both "WordPress" and "review" appear in the first and last sentences. The best possible SEO would include <h1> or <h2> tags, but that's not possible in EZA; like most article directories they don't give you the luxury of specifying those HTML tags. To simulate headers I used the <strong> tag instead, on lines that stand alone. The <strong> and and <em> tags are better than the tags used for bold and italic, because strong and em (means emphasis) have semantic meaning, whereas bold and italic are meant for typographic purposes. I used em tags to emphasize the phrase "WordPress review" in the last sentence.
The Content Itself
The review was based on half a dozen features everyone, including the WordPress theme, thought were the most important of the hundreds that were added in that version. It's good stuff, and reasonably well written because I had been using WordPress for a year or two by then. I did install the new version of WordPress and play with it for half an hour or so. I never write about things I don't know well. I knew none of the high-level material I discussed boomerang back on me because version 3 was well tested and because I discussed only features I had touched.
While I no longer keep in close touch with the corporate market, I added a paragraph on how WordPress saves money over corporate CMSes, because cursory market research told me that it was only then being considered a major contender. I thought it would be interesting to see if I got any Fortune 500 attention this way.
Results (all page 1 unless otherwise noted)
- Google top 10 for wordpress 3 review
- Google top 3 for: wordpress cms review
- Bing top 5 for wordpress cms review
- Yahoo top 5 for wordpress cms review
Failures
As I suspected, I didn't rank at all for the extremely competitive template keywords. I appear nowhere in the first few Google pages for "wordpress cms".
I should have posted new reviews for each new WordPress release. It would be better for my standing as a WordPress authority, and of course drive even more traffic. I would also focus on the primary and one secondary keyword next time.
I did no bookmarking and did not optimize the few submissions to document sharing sites. I also didn't use any automated submission software to get the long tail sites. Finally, I should have done a YouTube review and included the EZA text in its description.
Theft
The article has appeared on dozens of other sites, typically without attribution or the required links to my author profile or site. The author profile gets consistently stripped altogether, so it appears to have been written by those who post it. One particularly clever marketer with what I thought was a good blog uses a shrouding technique that shows my name in the search engine but makes the blog entry appear to be entirely his. Another site that lifted the article with no attribution or linking to me is run by a Warrior whose posts appear often here. Less than 10% of the "syndicating" sites followed EZA's attribution rules.
OPSEO still works
On-page SEO works, even with limited HTML formatting tags available. EZA can still be a potent force, even for highly competitive keywords, using only white hat techniques.
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