A while back I talked about the Ready Spaghetti method: take action as a beginner and just see what sticks.
I’ll talk about this more on the blog as we go, so sign up for email updates on the right if you’d like to stay updated. Back to the story…
The example I gave in my first Ready Spaghetti post was using the method to “master” search engine optimization.
The method goes like this. Instead of spending months reading about a topic, just start applying advice and see what sticks. (When Spaghetti is ready, it sticks to the wall when you throw it.)
So I’ve decided to try the method with SEO. I’ve achieved #1 rankings for terms before (like “Internet Copywriter”), but never on purpose. It’s time to change that.
I decided to start small with a search term that has little competition, and hence, next to no search traffic as well.
Playing around with Google’s Wonder Wheel let me find “Personal productivity cheats.” And Google Insights showed me that this term gets next to no traffic.
Good. That means it’ll be easy to hit #1 on my first measured try. It won’t get me traffic, but at least I’ll get to see from experience how Google works.
I did a few things I’d read about to establish links, and it wasn’t long before I was number 1.
Cool, my first intentional #1 ranking. That makes me a zero degree white belt at search engine optimization.
I want to keep working on it, though. If you can offer help or advice, please leave a comment. What should I try next?
And if you could benefit from SEO but haven’t given it a shot, want to try the method with me? Let me know in the comments and we can bounce ideas around.
Hey man – I was actually looking to get up my own site before reading this. I have a little SEO experience but never “got into it” – I have a few ideas that I think could work pretty well.
If you want to spitball ideas, and try things out, let me know.
My email is AndyWilson22@Gmail.com
You got it Andy, sending you an email.
Using some of Tinu’s tricks in reverse, you could leverage that #1 by working up the keyword tree that contains “Personal productivity cheats.” (It’s in reverse because she starts with the tree before working on the “low hanging fruit” as it were.)
How do you mean, Wayne? Like using the #1 “personal productivity cheats” ranked page to help me get a #1 “productivity tips” ranking? A keyword higher up the competition list?
Basically.
I checked a few and couldn’t find any phrases in SEObook’s keyword tool that would be the ‘parent’ of “personal productivity cheats” to go directly up the chain.
Wonderwheel had some related terms like “personal productivity tips” that might make sense to go after to leverage this #1 (and #2, #3, and #4 before the “see more from copywritingdean.com” in my search results just now, but remember, that’s influenced by the fact that I’m logged into my Google account and have been clicking your links from Gmail, so they may be pushing more of your stuff to the top of my results because they see your stuff as more relevant for me from my history).
If I were really working it up, I’d get the stats for the wonderwheel related terms and probably the next layer of terms related to those to decide what term(s) to target next.
Gotcha. And I assume you link all these pages together? Is there a book of Tinu’s you think I should check out?
You could link them all together, but that wasn’t the original intent. It is basically leveraging the relevancy of the page you got ranked for already to give you a boost when you start to rank for the more difficult terms.
I’m headed out the door, but I’ll find a link to Tinu’s course that I got this stuff from and post it later tonight.
I was sure I had the link saved/shortened and finally got back to my desk to find it: http://mercs.net/ets
The keyword tree idea came from the fast start guide in that course.
A chat with Tinu got me straightened out on a subtle point, which is that one site == one keyword tree == one site. (Yes, I repeated that on purpose.) Now I’m restructuring some things to take that into account.
Hope that helps.
Thanks Wayne. I’ll have to check that out in the future. I’m following Tinu on Twitter to try and stay up to date. Cheers!