My client is a college that markets to military students. Because of the new GI Bill that went into effect August 1, 2009, there was a huge push in this industry to reach out to veterans who might be interested in getting a – - basically free – - education. My goal was to build the site around the keywords most applicable to the a) topic; and b) demographic.
On Monday, June 29, 2009, I purchased the domain name.
On Tuesday, June 30, 2009, I installed a WordPress Blog and plugins and set up my Feedburner feed.
Components used were:
- Education Theme by StudioPress
- Akismet
- Add to Facebook
- Feedburner
- Google Analytics for WordPress
- Google XML Sitemap
- Khanh’s Quick Feeds (this allowed me to pull in a related RSS feed from Dept of Veterans Affairs)
- Mobile Press (for viewing on mobile phone)
- WP-Polls (which I may remove)
- StatPress
The rest of Tuesday I started building out categories and content
On Wednesday, July 1, I added more content. By late Wednesday Google had indexed the site.
On Thursday, July 2, I added more content, and by Thursday afternoon the site was on page #1 of Google for 3 of my main keywords and on page #2 for the other 2 keywords.
By Friday, analytics showed that I was already getting search-engine based traffic.
What’s the Magic?
There is none. Are you disappointed? Don’t be, because if there is no magic, my success is duplicatable.
My thoughts about the quick success:
- The site used WordPress, which we know gets indexed quickly by Google
- The site has a laser focus
- My target demographic was well-defined (meaning I knew exactly what information they were seeking)
- My content was totally relevant to my focus and demographic
I believe the key to quick indexing was using the WordPress platform
and the keys to getting on page #1 for my keywords are:
- a laser-focused site
- knowing your demographic so well that you know exactly what information they need
Let me know what you think.
Yes, Google loves WordPress blogs, but the reason you got indexed quickly was because you used the Google XML Sitemap plugin. It notifies Google to index the site whenever there are changes.
Getting to the #1 position takes some work, in the majority of cases, and well-written, keyword focused content is most of the battle. Great job!
Nice work, Nancy!
I hereby confirm the “WordPress effect.” One on my students has had an old-school site for years but his new WP project was light years ahead of it on Google only a few months after launch.
good job
Thanks for the comment Nik – although Craig Tuller (studiopress.com) tells me that having the Google XML sitemap generator really does the trick. Put that together with laser focused content and I think you’ll always have a winner. Nancy
Just about to change our company’s website from Dreamweaver to WordPress. We’re in the Motor Industry in the UK and I haven’t come across any dealers sites in WordPress so this could be a great step forward in obtaining higher Google pagerankings.
I also use studiopress for a number of other websites I have done for customers and now looking forward to the new ‘News’ theme which I will customise to a Motor Dealer site.
Thanks agaian for the info above, some great tips noted down.
Wow – You must be very good at SEO. It would seem to me that to rank on Google that fast the keywords must not have been too competitive. And – of course – all of your content must have been original and extremely relevant to the keywords of your site’s title tag and URL. Anyways, bravo! If you client lets you post the URL that would be great – I’ll check back. Many thanks, David
Congratulation. The more important is not you put your site on top of Google but how many people come to your site from the keywords you choose.
Great advice…Would you tell us the keyword that you ranked on serp?
Waw, it’s very amazing and unbelievable
Just in 3 days ???