How I Became Number 1
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After a ridiculously long 16 months of hard work, my SEO efforts have paid off. After bragging some on a thread in the SEO Chat forums, I figured I should actually explain what I did and how I did it. Before I begin, I should thank the loyal SEO Chat members for all of their help.
If you'd like to read the original comments, here's a link to the SEO Chat thread that inspired this article. If you'd rather not read the thread, you are probably wondering what exactly I did. Well, I took over the coveted #1 spot on Google for a highly competitive keyword in the health care field, beating search behemoths About.com and Wikipedia.org along the way. Now would you like to know how I did it?
To the chagrin of most of you, there is no SEO "silver bullet." In fact, much of the time you waste searching forums and web sites for that bullet could probably be better spent doing what works. And as much as you hate to hear it, what works is linking. I'd love, as much as anyone, to flip some switch and get all of the traffic in the world, but at the end of the day, you really need to roll up your sleeves and build links aggressively... very aggressively.
There is no magic number as far as number of links to get or number of hours to spend, but if you budget ten hours a week on SEO, 85 percent of them should be spent on building relevant links. Before I get to the all important linking strategy, I'd first like to discuss a few road blocks which you may be facing now.
Obstacle #1: Registration and login. Before I began working on this site, visitors were forced to register on their first click from the home page. So, the home page was "free" but anything else required registration. After much debate and hours of meetings, I finally convinced the powers that be that this system was as search unfriendly as could be. Because spiders cannot register and then login to a web site to crawl it, search engines have no way, other than links, to determine what your web site is about.
At the time, Google had indexed just 12 pages of the entire site! We decided to give visitors ten "free" clicks to use as they pleased before being asked to register. At that point, they would have familiarized themselves enough with our site to determine if further access was worth giving up their personal demographics or not. Today, Google has 2,580 pages indexed. However, removing registration introduced me to my next major road block, frames.
Next: Obstacle 2 and 3 >>
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