We're Number One!

Wow, I must admit to being very excited about this!  My SEO Venture website, www.snowmanornaments.org, has the number 1 ranking for my keywords when I checked this morning!  I guess the keyword changes and the additional content I added late last week were the key to putting me over the top.  My site jumped from the mid-70s to number 1 in only 5 days!

Check this out:

The lesson I learned from this is to pay extra close attention to your keyword selection and 'on page' SEO.  Spend time with Google Analytics and other tools to determine the best keywords for your niche.  Don't hurry or scrimp on effort here.  All the books, blogs and articles reinforced this but I guess I had to learn it by trial and error.

The changes I made to my keyword metatag were minor but simply duplicated what Google Analytics were reporting as the most searched for keywords in my niche.  Honestly, I thought I had previously made many of these changes but apparently not.

All this makes me wonder how much sooner I could have ranked in the top 2 pages of search results had I made these changes earlier.  Of course, that is why I took on this experiment in the first place.  To learn from my successes and my mistakes and to pass on my experiences to you.  So, I must consider the first part of my SEO Venture a success!  I have successfully started a niche website and succeeded in getting it ranked #1 on Google.


Unfortunately, I fear I am too late for this seasonal niche to see much income from my website.  It is now December 9th and most people have already purchased their decorations and decorated their homes.  To reiterate the key lesson I've learned here, when working with a seasonal niche market make sure you give yourself enough lead time to develop your niche and get ranked highly.  I should have started at least a month earlier than I did.  However, this does bode well for the next holiday season!

Search Rankings Stalled

Well, all the 'on page' and 'off page' SEO that I have been doing has landed my website, www. snowmanornaments.org, in the 69-79 range in Google search results.  It seems to have stabilized in that range.  It is a definite improvement over it's debut spot of 129 but not good enough to see substantial traffic as a result.  So, today I did a little more keyword research using Google Analytics and made some changes to my meta tags on the website.  I think I spotted a few mistakes I've make that may make a difference. 

I freely admit to a certain amount of frustration on my SEO Venture experiment but also have to keep reminding myself that I am a newbie at this after all.  I've done the major things all the SEO books and articles suggest and still haven't seen the desired results.  I'm sure there are a number of steps and nuances that a SEO guru may have already taken to have obtained better results.  However, I am committed to seeing this through whether or not it happens soon enough to take advantage of the holiday season.!

SEO Tip: Don't Forget About the ALT= Tag

A while back I wrote a post about 'on page' SEO techniques.  In it I failed to mention that you should avoid using images, flash animations, etc., to the exclusion of plain text that includes your primary keywords.  If my website is about snowman ornaments but all it has is a bunch of pictures of snowman ornaments as links, when search engine spiders crawl my site they will have very little to work with to determine its context.

This is because search engines can only read the text (html)  on your website.  They don't have the intelligence to understand the content of an image, flash animation or other graphic used your website.  That is, of course, if you forget to use the ALT= tag in the IMG SRC tag.  The ALT= tag was originally created to give web surfers some idea of what image was supposed to be displayed should their browser be unable to do so.   By placing their cursor over the image box shown when an image fails to display the alternate text would appear in a pop up box describing the content of the image.

However, the ALT= tag also has benefits for SEO in that search engines can and do find the text found in them.  So be sure to utilize the ALT= tag and include appropriate keywords in addition to the text on your website to help the search engines correctly determine the content of your website.  Don't try to stuff the ALT= tag with too many keywords as most search engines will penalize your ranking as a result.

This all came up as I was taking a look at my Google Analytics to see exactly where traffic to my site was coming from.  I noticed that Google image searches were resulting in a decent percentage of my traffic.  So I went to Google and did an image search for my primary keywords 'snowman ornaments'.  It returned two hits for images on my site on the third page of the search results.   That is much higher than my site ranks using the same keywords on a Google Web search.

However, since people can scan image search results much more quickly and easily than text search results they will page further into the results to find what they want.  Being on the third page of image search results was good enough to produce significant traffic to my website.  So, don't forget to use the ALT= tag or you will be ignoring a great way to drive traffic your way!

Search Rankings Beginning to Rise Again!

I didn't get a lot done to promote my SEO Venture over the Thanksgiving Holiday.  I was hoping that 4 days off would give me some free time to build some more backlinks to my site and do a bit of content updating on the site itself.  Well, the time was there but I guess the tryptophan from the turkey just made me too lazy.

I did, however, spend a couple of hours trying to build some backlinks on Friday.  I understand that Google weights one-way links back to a site more heavily than reciprocal links so I focused my efforts that way.  It also weights 'authorative' sites more heavily as well.   I did create a few reciprocal links to sites that were relevant to mine.  Google likes that better than links to and from irrelevant sites.

Well, here it is a week later and I think (hope) that I am beginning to see some results.  Google and the other search engines have had time to index some of these new backlinks and update their rankings.  At last check my search ranking rose to 69 out of approximately 113.000 results for my prime keyword phrase.  Still not good enough but getting better and my highest ranking yet.  If you recall, my site premiered at # 129.

I am encouraged because I feel I understand off page SEO a bit better and am developing a grasp of the basics of what needs to be done to push a site higher in the rankings.  I am certain now that I should have started this venture a month or two earlier in order to get my search rankings on to the first two pages on Google during the prime Christmas buying season.  Oh well, live and learn and this is a very important lesson.  Make sure you understand your seasonal niche market timing and how long it takes to rise in the search rankings.  This is especially true if you are a newbie to this as am I.  I'm sure an SEO guru could already have my site on page 1 of Google.  Then again, that is the purpose of this whole exercise, isn't it?