#2 in Google in 4 Weeks: Case Study

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Couple of weeks ago I started ranking for some coupon niche keywords in the hosting niche. I got some great results, both financial and from an SEO stand point. Since I never done this for the money but only for the sake of SEO I will share all my SEO strategies and reveal all the keywords I rank for.



Keywords: Arvixe coupon, Arvixe coupon code, Arvixe promo, Arvixe promo code, Arvixe coupon codes.

Current position in Google: #2

major competitors:

RetailMeNot.com ($147.4 million in revenue for 2012 according to Wikipedia)

Coupons.com (valued at $1 billion or more by venture-capital firms)


My site: BlogMakingSchool.com (1 year old, 31DA, no PR )



My BlogMakingSchool site was never relevant to Arvixe nor to coupon codes. To solve this problem here's what I did:

1. I changed the site title in: "BlogMakingSchool - Hosting Coupons & Reviews".

2. I created a "coupon codes" category that I included in the navigation menu.

3. I added 3 articles relevant to "Arvixe coupon codes" and "Arvixe discount".

4. I included a link to my main article in the sidebar.



The funny thing here is that I never included any of my main keywords in the content of my article. I used Google Adwords to locate all the keywords that were relevant to "Arvixe coupon" and used them instead.

Where I really put my efforts on was the html code complexity and and the vertical pixel size of the article.

Here are some of the things I needed to do:

1. Include my main keyword in the url.
2. Include my main keyword in the title.
3. Write over 500 words keyword relevant content.
4. Make sure that the the vertical size of the article was large.
5. Create html class divs for every coupon code I inserted in the article.




If you check the backlink profile of my article you'll see a lot of "negative SEO backlinks" made by my competitors. They're loosing a lot of profits because of me so they're desperately trying to wipe out of the SERP's.

The links that I build were 110 in total. Here's the amount, variety and type of backlinks I've build:

20 x high PR guest post article links
10 x web 2.0 links
30 x blogroll links
30 x social links
5 x pdf article links
5 x press release links
10 x nofollow comment links

Here's the anchor text density I used:

70% - naked link
5% - arvixe coupon on BlogMakingSchool
5% - arvixe coupon
5% - arvixe coupon code
5% - arvixe promo code
5% - arvixe coupons
5% - use this coupon, here (natural anchor text)



When distributing the content among different high PR sites I made sure to mention my domain name once in the article title and once in the article content. Most of my titles would look like this: "BlogMakingSchool releases new Arvixe Coupons".

Google's highest relevancy factor is the title of an article. By mentioning my domain name next to "Arvixe coupon" in different headings I strongly associated my domain name with this company.

I also did a Google + post sharing campaign using this same strategy.



Here's my little SEO secret:

Every url that shows in the SERP's has an algorithmic score. Highest the score, higher you rank.

The results from the first 5 pages showing up for "Arvixe coupon" have higher score than the rest of the neighborhood.

Having 2 links pointing to your article from page 5 gives you higher score than 5 links from page 15.

There are also other factors that bring some extra points to the score. Few of them are number of links, domain age, PR, content quantity and so on.

To speed up the ranking process I worked hard on bringing most of my High PR backlink articles before page 5 in the SERP's for the "arvixe coupon" keyword.


I really hope this post will guide you on your next SEO quest. If it happens that you use my strategy please don't forget to share your results with the rest of us.
#search engine optimization #backlinks #case #case study #google #link acquisition #seo #study #weeks
  • Banned
    With content quantity you mean the content that surrounds your back links or the content on the arvixe coupon code?

    In case of back link surrounding content, did you test this seperately? If so what was the outcome? Normally I always thought it wouldn't matter much but obvious such links will rank better when there's more content so I guess that provides the answer already. Still it would be nice to see separate case studies on this to really see how much difference it makes.

    Pretty solid case study, I like the mention about ranking your guest posts (although I would never want someone to build spam links to my private network sites), so what did you do to rank those posts in say the top 50?

    I see a lot of sitewide links with the anchor: Arvixe, did you build those yourself or is that the spam you talked about?
    • [1] reply
    • By content quantity I mean the overall site content/ number of indexed articles.

      For some articles I almost repeated the strategy i used for my main article (making less links). For others I made 200 x day (for a total of 30 days) comment backlinks.

      Thanks for your opinion. I agree on your case study proposition and since I already participate in a reverse engineering & testing program (that I'm not allowed to talk about yet) I'll look forward on making a similar experiment.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • Great Thanks For your Awesome Info And Examples

    Good Work !

    Best Of Luck For The Future
  • Thanks! it's a really cool strategy, I wonder if it's gonna work in high-competition niche, though.
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  • I hit the thank button because I always appreciate people sharing things like this. Solid case study as well.
    • [1] reply
    • Nice one. What rank tracker are you using?
      • [1] reply
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  • Congrats... Now the quite harder thing is to reach and STAY on 1st page! Keep up the good work!
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    • [1] reply
    • Naked and branded URL links are def the way to go these days to keep it natural looking.
  • Great thanks, I have a question.You mentioned: guest posting and blog roll?Did you buy them?How did you get them?
    • [1] reply
  • Great study man!!! I have a few questions though. How did you manage to get 20 guest posts? I guess they would be paid posts or links on your PBN because no one would accept posts with such commercial links. What about the social links?

    And I didn't understand what you meant by 'Having 2 links pointing to your article from page 5 gives you higher score than 5 links from page 15.' Did you manage to get your web 2.0 properties or blog posts within page 5 in serps? How is it possible? Did you manually link or automated links for tier 2 linking.
    • [1] reply
    • I've published most of the guest posts on my own high PR sites. I also did the social links myself.

      About the strategy:

      From an algorithm point of view;every url in the SERP must have a score. Higher the score higher you rank. Getting a link from a url that ranks high in the SERP's for your keyword means that it will pass some of that high score to your score.

      Exp: A url that has only comment links has lower algorithmic score than a url that has article links pointing to it.

      If you put this theory into practice you'll notice that 2 links on 2 well written high PR articles with other articles linking to them shows better results than links from 10 articles that have only comment links pointing to them.
  • Thank you to share your case study it's really helpful.
    but seem quite take time... anyway i feel worth it.
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  • Nice description of a well-executed small-scale SEO project. Thanks for posting.
  • Thanks For for sharing Great Information.

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    Couple of weeks ago I started ranking for some coupon niche keywords in the hosting niche. I got some great results, both financial and from an SEO stand point. Since I never done this for the money but only for the sake of SEO I will share all my SEO strategies and reveal all the keywords I rank for.