ABC's of Blogging #1 on Page One of Google!

WOW! ABC’s of Blogging for Money is #1 on Google and Blog Along With Me holds a respectable #2 position on Google’s page one! I am soooooo happy … I don’t think I have ever been #1 before! But before I sink into the euphoria of this most honored position I have some explaining to do …………..

The next round of topics on this blog is going to be on linking. While I have a fairly good working knowledge of this marketing technique I thought it would be a good idea to bone up on what other top dog bloggers have to say.

The more I read, the lower my spirits sank. I thought once again I did not do enough homework before starting this blog. The glaring error?

Keywords! Or the lack of them in my links. The most powerful link that you have is your domain name. For this blog I had decided to fight for Blogging for Money … while I frequently pepper this phrase in my postings, the domain name rules and it is glaringly bereft of the keyword phrase that I want this blog to become known for.

In an earlier post I had mentioned that this is a long term blog. I am blogging on how to blog – that is a crowded market with professional sites such as Blogger and Wordpress sitting comfortably in the top ranks on page one. Then there is Darren Rowse with his long standing and very popular Problogger coming up strongly in the middle of page one. When I was researching my keyword phrases, I decided that I could live with going for the phrase “blogging for money” which generates a daily search of 145.

While I did not expect to be sharing page space with Blogger, Wordpress or Darren, I did think that at least I would have got Google’s blessing with a page rank … oh, even page rank 1(with Google the higher the number of the page rank, the better it is) would have been great. Nada. Not even a nod.

Linking. Aha. The more I read on linking the deeper the realization sank in … It’s the link, stupid! The domain link does not have the keyword phrase in it! What does it have? It has the far more competitive word “blog” in it. Over 2 million searches daily. Other established and more savvy marketers are cornering that market! Dumb!!!

Now there are other strategies that I can employ to overcome this error but it would take time and aggressive marketing techniques. I could also go for another domain name and have it redirected to this site – I already did that once. I read that as prominent a blogger as Yaro Starak changed his first blog’s domain name three times. But this linking thing kept niggling at me. Then I had an idea. I Googled “blog along with me” and voila, there is my blog on page 1 holding positions 2, 3, 4 and 5.

My first reaction was big deal! Who goes searching for “blog along with me” but then I looked at the numbers – there it was in the 1 -10 of a possible 111,000,000! Be still my heart. How did my little blog of just 6 months beat out over a 100 million other entries?

I looked at each position to see what it was that helped me get to page one and as best as I can figure it out:

Content: The title “Blog Along With Me” is in the header. The phrase “blog along with me” appears in the description of the blog beneath the title in the header. This is a static part of the blog so that everytime a new post is added and the spiders or bots crawl this site, Blog Along With Me keeps showing up. Fresh content, consistent keyword.

Adbrite: I recently added Adbrite as an alternate to Adsense to monetize the blog. It is an interesting advertising system which works in tandem with Adsense, but replacing it when it can do better. Adbrite advertises to prospective advertisers and its ad for Blog Along With Me got picked up by Google. That is a link pickup. It occupies position No. 3.

Blog Catalog: I had submitted Blog Along to Blog Catalog and that too got crawled by Google and once again it is a link pickup

Twitter: One of my readers (bless you Michael) tweeted one of the posts on Twitter. And even though it was a Twitter URL it was a backlink to this site again!

I keep thinking of Mike Litman who was my first mentor. His favorite saying is “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”

I had an idea! What about my A B C’s of Blogging for Money? That has been up a scant month. To my surprise, there it was on page one holding top spot in the 1 – 10 out of a possible 27,500,000! This time the keyword phrase was in the domain title, and my press release got picked up.

This is really encouraging. It means that if you do enough of the right stuff it will eventually over ride the wrong stuff and your efforts will begin to pay off. More on that in the next post.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for Money

PS… That’s a big smiley on the cheese.

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