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September 18, 2006
Guaranteed Top Search Engine Ranking?
This entry might be about guaranteed top search engine ranking, but it should or could be titled "Why I'm No Longer A Chicken-Hearted Wimp!"
It's no secret that I abandoned the search engine game years ago as being to difficult, too confusing and just too darned much trouble for too little results. Then about a year and a half ago, my good friends Andy Jenkins & Brad Fallon basically told me I was a chicken-hearted wimp and that they could teach me how to successfully play the SEO (search engine optimization) game. I grudgingly decided to give it One Last Shot ... and am I ever glad. Our web traffic and income have skyrocketed since that point and I'm very comfortable with search engines now. In fact, I (mostly) enjoy them. It's fun to match wits with Google, Yahoo and MSN. And if you think that's a nutty statement {fun? playing the Google game? Is she nuts?} I certainly understand - there was a time I would have thought such a statement was preposterous, myself.
Andy and Brad have a new site opening next week - on Monday the 26th, as a matter of fact. It's going to be the most awesome event on the Net because not only are Brad & Andy involved, but some of the biggest names on the net. I don't want to steal their fire and I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that part, so I'll shut up about the others. I will also candidly tell you that it's quite expensive.
BUT ... even if you never intend to join you should take advantage of some of the freebies they're giving away. There are three awesome videos with more information than most of the paid courses I've ever bought. And yesterday they came out with a $0 downloadable pdf. It has several case studies in it - one of which is mine.
What They Didn't Tell You (Because They Didn't Know)
In this case study they mention a couple of keyword phrases on Google in which our Auction Genius Course site has high placement. But they didn't know about the most amazing change ...
That is for the keyword phrase "ebay selling". For some weird reason, I had completely overlooked that one because according to my keyword research, it receives approximately 466 searches every 24 hours. That's an amazing number of searches, and obviously I want to be on the first page of Google for that one.
But the problem was, I was nowhere to be found! I went through page after page of results and couldn't find us anywhere. The best tools I have only go down 500 places on Google and it couldn't find us either. What to do?
About three weeks ago I was having dinner with Brad Fallon and a few other folks and Brad made a comment about a simple change that we could make. It wasn't directed to me in particular but I started thinking about it and decided to do what he said. It took me less than five minutes and then I decided to check back in a week or so to see what had happened.
To my astonishment, I was on the front page - number 9, to be exact. I don't know how long I'd been there but it was amazingly easy. This morning on Google, our site was #5 - but notice the competition ahead of me:
#1: about.com
#2: allbusiness.com
#3 & #4: ebay
These are all massive, giant sites and will be tough to beat - although you never know. As Andy & Brad point out in their case study, there are keywords where I absolutely do beat eBay itself, although I wonder how that can possibly be. Still it happens. For instance, on the very important keyword phrase "what to sell on ebay", I am beating eBay, Amazon, microsoft and about.com.
A few search engine observations:
* You might do well in one search engine and not in others. For instance, I'm not anywhere on the first two page of Yahoo or MSN for "ebay selling".
* The SEs change: just because I'm not on Yahoo or MSN now doesn't mean I won't be in the future.
* Some SEs provide better traffic than others. Yes, I'm sometimes annoyed with Google but our testing shows it's the best search engine for our kind of business. We get more business from Google than all the others put together.
* SEO is about numbers. Right now Google is showing that it's indexed 849 pages of our Auction Genius Course site. With that many pages, we have lots of chances for top positions on keyword phrases.
* Studies show that consumers & buyers are 3 1/2 times more likely to click on the organic searches than they are Pay Per Clicks (PPC). I'm assuming that there is more credibility. As the case study says, "Sydney's niche is one of those deadly niches where PPC traffic costs about as much as a small island in the Caribbean." That's for sure.
If you have the faintest interest in search engines, take advantage of the knowledge offered by these two multi-millionaire SEO experts:
And if you're one of the select people who joins next week, I'll see you on the inside since I'm one of their forum moderators.
And by the way ... no one, NO ONE, can "guarantee" you top search engine ranking - unless your keyword phrase is "extra tall purple people eater". If they do - run.
Posted by SydneyJohnston at September 18, 2006 12:09 PM
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