I'm #1 on Google thanks to hard work and Digital Point

It took 13 long hours of straight code changes and optimization along with 4 weeks of analysis. I'm now number 1 on my most competitive keyword.

This is just the first, largest, and most competitive keyword for my particular site, but ALL of my other keywords and phrases for the site are nearly linearly improving each day. I'm ranked #1 on 4 different phrases, and ranked top 30 for almost 20.... and thats just the improvements for this week.

The most interesting thing is.... I outrank the official website for the game that my gaming fansite is for!

Here's what I did:

- READ! READ! READ! There is so much to learn from the collective information available here at DP. Be sure to look at the failures as well as the success stories.
- 100% Original Content all developed by myself and our site's community
- No Link Trading or Development Because all of my content is origional, many pages of my site has been linked from tons of other sites, in some cases I allowed forign sites to copy and translate my content for their sites along with the condition of linking to the source.
- No keyword stuffing - None of the content was written for SEO
- Specific Alt Tags, keyword oriented but descriptive
- Custom Titles - This may have been my largest initial mistake. All of my pages called from the same header.php file that I had used instead of manually adding titles and desciptions. To date, the custom titles for each page hasnt even been updated and the pages are already ranking well. I cant wait until they get fully reindexed.
- Custom Descriptions - One of the last and most time consuming things that I did that seemed to help quite a bit. Each page has its own description.
- Listen to people that know what they're talking about, ignore people that don't - I have to thank these people for atleast one of their posts that I found uniquely helpful:

lingeriediva
Fryman
Greenguy
hasbehas
ozband
Shawn (keyword tracking tool for analysis)

Edit: The particular keyword has about 1,300,000 competitor sites
Edit 2: The only other more competitive keyword for my site is one that is shared by more than just this game, and has about 2,500,000 competitor listings. This will be the next keyword I plan on optimizing for... I'll be sure to post news as it comes.
Edit 3: For Yahoo, I am #2 out of 1,850,000 - just behind the game's official website. I am #1 on MSN as well.

 

I'm glad you're doing well and I agree with you. Even though you can't believe everything you read here I've found most of the information here quite helpful.

As for the title, I couldn't resist making a joke--

Google must think very highly of DP. Thanks to my post in website reviews and my signature, This thread

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=37349

is #1 for the term "compare online video game rental".

 

Citizen - How has your traffic volumn changed?

 

Congrats..
Nice to hear your success story.

 

Was this from the co op advertising or from some other tools?

 

care to reveal your content sources and how you did it

 

For a quick analysis, last month I was recieving about 1,000 monthly visits of google traffic and 350 from google images.

This month, as of today, I have recieved almost as much as last month with 13 days left, with today being the first day of being ranked #1.

I'll be sure to post some sort of detailed comparison after a few days when I can make an accurate assessment.

Sure! My content consists mainly of game guides that I hand write for the particular game that our site is about. Usually, I update the site 3-4 times a week with either new content from myself or content that was made by community members at our forums. NONE of our content was made for the sake of content or used for SEO. ALL was made because it had a use and a demand for it.

 

couldn't we make a list of the most helpful threads? (the must read ones)

Quadrupled my CTR thanks to DP members.

 

What is the keyword and what is your url?

Let mee guess.... "gunz game" and URL is gunzfactor.com?

 

No. I used no kind of link trading, link development, SEO performance enhancing tools, beaver tranquilizers, or steroids.

The only tool that I used was for analytical purposes, which was made by shawn here at DP and can be found here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

 

are your keywords competitive?

 

Edited my original post to include some information about the competitiveness of the said keywords.

 

So do you mean each page should have a unique title and not have the homepage title in it?

 

Wow what a derailment.

Congrats on the ranking Citizen!

 

We're going to have to find out the effect on that becuase my pages have not yet been reindexed since I made that change. Regardless, this wouldnt change my overall listing for my index page. The individual titles will hopefully increase my rankings for the individual keywords that each page pertains to.

For instance, our guides page used to be titled "Domain.com" Instead, now they would read "Domain.com - Guides"

Edit: edited my first post to include Yahoo and MSN rankings as well.

 

Hi letsmake

Each page is your property on the internet and as such each page should have its own set of head tags consisting of <title> <meta keyword><meta description>

Since each page should have a different topic, so each should have a different title. This will allow you to focus on one keyword term per page. 10 pages of content will give you 10 different keyword terms to focus on.

You can look at my site head tags to see the concept at work
sem-advance.com

Hope this helps

 

Hi Citizen

Actually unless your company is a brand name people would search for the domain name or url should be at the end of the tags and not the begining.

Such as

<title>Blue Widget Information Resource News Blue Widgets Sale Priced BlueWidget Co Inc</title>

This way weighting and density is applied to the main keyword terms more than on the company brand.

Peace

 

We place the name at the begining more for namesake and identity than SEO. If it becomes necessary for us to change our content pages' titles to something more weight orientated after they get reindexed, then we'll probably do that.

 

So what is the keyword and URL?

 

Sounds like a plan and I would say that at times depending on the competitiveness factor of your industry and keyword terms there are some steps in SEO that are more important to use for some more than others.

Like everything mileage will vary and reasons for doing some things and not others. Good to see different viewpoints and reasons.

Peace