With the help of DP members and the overal power of DigitalPoint in general, a brand new site we launched for a petition to bring back Commander in Chief is already ranking #2 in Google! Granted I know this isn't a competitive KW or phrase, but it's still a good achievement as we're releasing a press release in the morning and trying to create a buzz around this term, so it's big for us. By the way, the number one result is an article submission done by a DP member too - thanks Adam!
Danny - happy to explain a bit further if you can clarify that a bit ... I don't want to start with what time I woke up Do you mean with the project in general, the petition, or the SERP/SEO end of it only?
There was no secret or special formula really. First and foremost, it's not a competitive KW term or phrase so that helped honestly. I'd have to say the biggest "leg-up" was getting some good backlinks. As such, most of the success is due to off-page SEO factors: DP member Adam mentioned in the intitial post did an article submission to some high traffic and PR article depots. I linked to it from DP. I linked to it from a few of my heavily hit sites, and other DP members have helped out with links, blog posts, etc. Placing AdSense on the site gets the Google Media Bot to the site immediately which brings in the other two Googlebots. As far as on-page factors: A KW rich, relevant title and placing the title as the top most element under head. KW relevant image id's and alt-text. Again, nothing special, so if you're looking for any secrets or insider information, this isn't it. But I still must admit to feeling a bit proud ... out ranking other sites that have been trying this already for a few months and this site is beating them out.
nice mini tutorial. i think i really need to work on my backlinks. i have had two of my sites recently placed into wikipedia i found through looking at my stats. i just need to keep getting thse going it seems i have never placed enough emphasis on that. my latest site http://www.lpgconversions has not even been indexed yet and yours only took two days!!
Thanks; happy to share experiences. Again, I have to emphasize the some good backlinks on sites that are indexed frequently helped - the added bonus of being relevant didn't hurt.