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Whenever a new client signs on, it's with the understanding that even though they will see results on and off for six months - in most cases, it will take that entire term to build a solid foundation to secure those positions for the future - mostly because of PageRank building efforts.
This is the eighth *big* client that we've had - and after six months (and this current Google dance) it looks like we've now secured #1 across the board on Google/AOL/Netscape, along with Fast/Lycos, AV, and Yahoo! from previous months... not for just one keyword phrase - but for that and their root keyword. Similar successes have been seen (top three listings) on MSN and various other engines.
No spam. No paid links. No doorways.
Two BIG revelations (discussed below).
I experimented during the first three months with NO META TAGS, and all went well with the META-aware spiders... possibly even better than the first 3 months of previous campaigns.
This is, in essence, what our campaign was comprised of:
I. Focus on numbers and beat them.
a)How much content does the competitor have?
b)What are the keyword percentages that they use?
c)How many one, two, and three word terms do they use?
d)What's the overall size of the page that ranks high?
II. Content blitz.
a) Exceed the number of pages that the competitor's site has.
b) Create a couple of subdomains and fill them each with at least 25 pages of exclusive content. (EXAMPLE: glossary.domain.com)
REVELATIONS:
1. META tags are now officially D-E-A-D.
The rankings obtained for our client's site is undeniable proof that META tags means even less than nothing in today's SEO world. In fact, you might even say that typing them is a waste of production time. Again, if you missed it the first time - this site dominates big time, and doesn't have a single META tag within it's code.
2. More pages of content within your site will beat more inbound links from other sites as long as that content and the links within are tightly woven together.
Our main competitor, in this case, owns the banners/towers/buttons within the search results and is a Fortune 500 company. Our focus on 80% content to 20% inbounds (since there were very little qualifying inbounds to be had) leaped us up seven spots in the second half of this campaign (approximately 90 days).
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Now I'm not saying that this was easy. Remember, six months is a long time and money spent. My company had to produce over 4,000 pieces of original content based on exhaustive research and aggregate almost twice as much from more archive resources than we've ever had to deal with before... all between six people working close to 60-80 hour weeks.
This was, hands-down, the hardest project we've ever taken on - but it's also the most rewarding. The payoff on Friday will be phenomenal for all of us... and we stayed within the bounds of proper SEO etiquette.
Remember, the next time you decide to "beat the system" - you might just be beating yourself.
We might make you wait longer for results, but good guys always win!
Your post is pure inspiration to a newbie like me!
Thanks for sharing!
Take care and absolute best wishes,
Louis
making a good, easy to use, informative site is the way to go, the days of spamming etc are on the way to dying! GO CLEAN SITES!
I know that when I started looking at the WW forums I was thinking of cloaking but I have attained good results (far better then I would have imagined) from focusing on finding good keyphrases and developing lots of content focusing on one keyphrases per page.
Great! That's just what I have started out to do this week! Summer cleaning :)
