One of the things that we’re obviously tracking as we grow our community here is our ability to do well in all areas of search, from organic to direct links, to mentions on social media properties, and more.
We’re tracking it all (as you should too) so that we can begin to optimize our blog this year. It will take a lot of effort and take time but the payoff is always worth the time spent. No one on staff here would ever call anyone a SEO Expert or Professional but we’ve been around the block to be dangerous enough.
One of the larger internal SEO goals that we had coming in is to see how quickly we could rank for our primary keywords – the obvious ones that we would hope to earn and win by default of our own name, like “wp daily” and “wpdaily”. Our hope was to grab these as quickly as possible and see how Google and the other search engines would begin to respond to our existence on the internet.
It took just about a month but we finally grabbed the #1 slot in Google with some slightly lower results in Bing and Yahoo!:
Google Results:
Bing Results:
Yahoo! Results:
Were excited about this jump from “nothing” to “something” so quickly! For anyone that’s launching a new blog it should be on top of your list to be able to lock-in these primary keywords so that you can begin to track, understand, and optimize how the search engines are responding to your new site.
This is especially key when you’re up against some other sites that have owned those top spots for a long time – years in some cases. For example, for us as a .co domain to beat out the .net, .org, and .coms so quickly is nothing short of awesome.
So, how did we do it? There are obviously a number of factors and signals that help search engines acknowledge that we’re around as well as begin to rank us strongly for keywords but the #1 signal that has grossed us such a fast return is simply this: Consistent and unique content.
There’s no strategy to this other than what has been plainly and well-documented: Original content is a winner for all search engines and they give this a higher signal than repeat or washed up content. Combine that with the consistency of an editorial and news blog and you have a strong chance of ranking high quickly.
We’ve been blogging non-stop since we started so we are not entirely surprised that we could beat our competitors in this regard but we have been pleasantly surprised at how quickly we could do it.
What does this mean for you and your blog? It means that the top spots owned on search may not be as strong as you may believe meaning that your ability to topple those sites and outrank them is entirely possible. You can do it with unique and consistent content and by the sheer fact that you won’t quit.
Now, since we’ve gobbled up some of primary keywords we’re on the hunt for our secondaries. At some point I’ll share more of our strategy and tactics so that you can maximize your efforts as well. Cheers!
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