SEO Journey

SEO Journey to a #1 Ranking

By Doug Williams - January 2006

My website www.dwassoc.com has a number one ranking for “small business consulting” on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google shows this as out of over 58 million relevant pages. My journey started with a brand new website three and a half years ago.

Web Design

I started my small business consulting company in June of 2002. The first step was to locate a website designer. He built a great looking website and made promises of getting top rankings. I soon discovered that my designer knew nothing about search engines. Like many designers, he was a creative graphics person, but had no understanding of optimization.

If I wanted my website to do well, it was clearly going to be up to me. I began reading everything I could find about search engine optimization. I discovered that my website had some major issues. It was built in frames, there was very little text on my home page and my designer refused to make any changes. I finally pulled my website back from him, bought copies of Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop and started making changes. My first step was to flatten the site and remove the frames.

Keywords

My next step was to choose the keywords that people would use to find my website. I quickly became proficient at selecting keywords using Wordtracker. I settled on about 20 phrases that would really describe the services that I was providing. “Small business consulting” was my primary phrase. At that time Google showed 6 million other pages using that same phrase. I knew that I was starting at number 6 million.

I busied myself and designed the page structure for my new “improved” website, using keywords in as many of the page names as possible. Wanting my website to be a good resource, I wrote many pages of content that would be helpful to a small business. My goal was to get a business owner to give me a call to seek help.

Optimization

I purchased a copy of WebPosition and began optimizing each of my pages. I carefully crafted the Meta Tags, worked the keywords into the text the right number of times. I did all the other things you would do in optimizing a page.

Next, I turned my attention to off page optimization. I purchased reciprocal link software and set up my first link directory. I spent many hours researching and finding websites to trade links with. I sent out hundreds, if not thousands of emails to request link trades or asking about where my link was. This task was the most time consuming and labor intensive part of the SEO process. I traded links with just about anyone who wanted to… well almost.

Progress

After about a year we had made it to the bottom of page one on Google and I was getting some pretty good traffic to my website. Then in November of 200 3 Google’s Florida update happened and my website dropped from # 8 to # 3 2 5 overnight. Traffic to my site almost stopped.

Many other websites were affected the same way. The general consensus in all the forums, was that webmasters who were following good SEO practices should stay the course and not panic. Things have a way of correcting after a major algorithm change.

Rather than just wait, I went back and re-optimized my web pages and then focused on cleaning up my link directory. I deleted links that weren’t reciprocating and made sure that all of my link-trading partners were related to my business.

After about 6 weeks, I was back onto page 1. I slowly moved up until about 6 months later I was in the # 1 position on Google. I have since been there to stay (I hope).

My reciprocal linking software was very cumbersome so I designed my own program that was more flexible and more efficient to use. I developed many of my own tools with custom features. I watched the search engines trends very carefully and kept making changes to avoid spamming the search engines and yet deliver what they were looking for.

More Progress

I carefully tracked my website traffic statistics to look for trends. By the end of 200 4, I noticed that “small business consulting” was now my number two volume keyword. I was now getting more traffic from “business consulting” This was not one of my targeted words. The reciprocal link campaign had done its job! I was being found for dozens of unexpected phrases because my website was now being highly valued by the search engines.

As the rules have changed, I have continuously made changes to my site. I have worked hard to not trick the search engines, but rather make my site compliant with what they are looking for. I freshen up the optimization about every 3 months. Most of my traffic today is coming from the search term “business consulting” and I am positioned second only to IBM for this. Occasionally I will move ahead of IBM and then later they will pass me again.

Results

More importantly, what has this meant for my business? In 3- 1/ 2 years I have grown from a 1 person company to now having 7 employees. My business has changed from just business consulting to Internet marketing and SEO. I have developed my own SEO process that seems to work well.

I credit an intensive focused reciprocal link campaign along with good on-page optimization to getting this excellent ranking. This website has never used any alternative linking strategies.