From nowhere to the first page of Google and Yahoo in 11 days
In my quest to learn and share the basics of SEO and keyword ranking, I posted a recent article titled: Graphic design Edinburgh and keyword search ranking.
Just 11 days on and I’m delighted to see my website listed on the first page of Google for graphic design edinburgh.
Why am I so delighted?
Well, I’m a graphic designer who isn’t very clued in on search engine optimisation, so to witness such fast results was a great surprise.
My head isn’t in the clouds however. I realise that the specific keywords (graphic design edinburgh) aren’t very popular in the grander scheme of things. In saying that, I mentioned in my previous keyword ranking article that there are more than 360 searches per month for that particular phrase. That’s a possible 360 targeted, LOCAL, visits to my website that I’m missing out on.
Although many of my clients are outside the UK and Ireland, I love meeting people face-to-face in order to build stronger relationships. So if I can continuously attract more business right on my doorstep, then fantastic.
Just 11 days ago I was nowhere to be seen when searching for specific keywords. Today I’m on the first page of Google at number eight, and on the first page of Yahoo at number six. It’s the little things that make me happy.
How did I do it?
The first thing I did was change my site’s tagline in the WordPress admin (Options >> General). Previously it stated:
Reflections from throughout the world of creativity
I changed it to read:
Graphic design Edinburgh, web design Edinburgh, branding, logo design, advertising and marketing
Also, I thought that creating the previous article with the words “graphic design edinburgh” in the post heading would help.
I made my keywords bold, as I’ve read that search engines place more emphasis on words that have added weight.
You’ll notice that my site footer now contains a link to my homepage, with the keywords Edinburgh graphic designer. Andy Beard suggested that one.
It’s not all rosey however.
One keyword optimisation tactic is to anchor your hyperlink text with choice words.
Some of you will have noticed that recently, with my comments on your own blog, I’ve changed my name from ‘David Airey :: Creative Design ::‘ to ‘David Airey :: Graphic Design Edinburgh ::‘. Now, if you have removed NoFollow from your website comments, every link to your commenter’s sites will count towards your own keyword ranking.
Here’s the crux, I recently had a conversation with Rob, SEO expert at Yack Yack (notice how I’ve made SEO expert bold, which I hope will help Rob somehow?) where he told me:
A little tip, some people might not take too kindly to anchor texted comments, today I dont mind so much, but just be mindful that others, especially those who are really into this stuff, might take it to be a little cheeky.
The last thing I want to do is come across as being cheeky, or only out for personal gain, so thanks for pointing that out Rob. I really hope I haven’t rubbed anyone up the wrong way with my efforts.
Speaking of Rob, he recently wrote a great article titled: Link tips – are you linking to your friends in a useful way? Certainly worth a read.
How do I rank within UK pages?
Here’s one of the many things I haven’t yet learnt how to do, and that’s rank for my chosen keywords when searching ‘pages from the UK’.
When I search ‘the web’ via Google i.e. no specific country or region, at the time of writing I appear on the first page of results.
However, when I set the check-box to search pages from the UK, I’m not even in the top 20 pages. That’s not so good. I own both www.davidairey.com and www.davidairey.co.uk.
Do you know anything about this?
It’s important to have a range of keywords or phrases that you rank for, so here’s hoping I can make a dent with graphic design scotland or web design edinburgh in the near future.
For more information on search engine optimization and keyword ranking, take a look at these excellent articles from people who really know their stuff:
- Secret way to rank No1 for any keyword Guaranteed! by Cornwall SEO
- The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (that’s really no secret at all) by SEOmoz
- Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview by Sugarrae via Maki at Dosh Dosh
Related posts on David Airey dot com
52 appreciated comments on “From nowhere to the first page of Google and Yahoo in 11 days”
What are your thoughts?
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Good SEO can really make a world of difference. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but as you can see, the results can be well worth it.
I need to really rethink all of my keywords and figure out which ones I want to promote for each of my sites.
Great post, David. Easy to comprehend for newcomers like me. :p
I also found the article about linking useful. I might have some links on words like ‘here’ or ‘this post’ and so on, which obviously is pretty useless. Going to keep that in mind.
Speaking about anchoring links.. Is it a point that the anchor text is consistent throughout all my comments, or can I alternate between keywords and no keywords as I feel it suits?
Cheers.
Well, that’s not a bad result, I mean for a DIY SEO is great. Congrats.
Word of warning, when I changed our website title within a couple of weeks we appeared on the first page of “Edinburgh Computer Services”. Although now we are on the fourth page. I think this is called the Google Sandbox. Having said that, hopefully your large blog community has help.
Jamie
Mihaela, thanks very much, although as Jamie points out, perhaps I’m seeing the Google Sandbox effect. According to Wikipedia (when I entered Google Sandbox) the effect is debatable, and doesn’t affect Yahoo rank, so that’s a plus. Thanks Jamie for bringing that up though. I’d never heard of it before.
Asgeir, I wrote this article the only way I know how, as an SEO newbie. There’s a lot to take in around the subject, so I put this together little by little. I’m glad it was of use to you! I’m not entirely sure what you mean with your question. The only downside to alternating your anchor text on my site is that your comment will probably go into moderation, as the one above did.
Char, thanks for dropping by today.
I think it can be spammy, I often delete comments from people I don’t know who are just following down a Dofollow blogroll spamming links.
One of the things you have to also be aware of is the time it takes for a link to be attributed, which is what I am linking to above.
It is still personal because I have my name, and I am using a link that might be useful, and giving it reasonable anchor text.
Dunno exactly how vital this is in the grand scheme of SEO, but the gurus also seem to stress adding a TITLE tag to your link code like so:
<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/” title=”Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”>Wikipedia</a>
Supplying the TITLE tag gives the search bots more to chew on. I especially like using that because it generates a little tool tip that appears when hovering over the link with the cursor. This gives the reader a bit more advance info about the link he/she is about to click.
And you can add this to your image code also – not in place of the ALT tag, but in addition to it.
But again, I haven’t been able to get a feel for exactly how much this factors into the overall SEO strategy. For me, it’s just a completeness & consistency thing.
You make a good point, Andy.
It’s because of your actions that I often link to an article of interest through my name in comments.
I like your example here, and also the post you link to.
Rob O., adding the title tag is something I’ve not been doing. I wonder if anyone else has an opinion on this? Thanks for the info buddy.
Rob, you’re very welcome, and thanks for summing it up excellently:
Great news David and thanks for the mention.
It really isn’t rocket science and when you get the fundamentals its pretty straightforward, just takes a little time to know what is and what isnt BS and hogwash.
Good titles, good headings,accessible content, clean urls, good themed content, linking out to related stuff, getting linked back to through related words, saying stuff worth linking to etc
Stuff just like this really :)
Cheers
The Sandbox effect happens when Google sends your site to the supplemental results or bans it completely, and not when you lose your high rankings. To keep that ranking for your keyword phrase you need to continue your SEO efforts. I have an article about Google’s supplemental trap here. Most of the rules apply for the sandbox too, is just that it’s harder to get out of the snabox then to get out of the supplemental results. There are many factors that could lead to such mishaps, but you shouldn’t worry about that now. You’ve done nothing wrong. Just stay away from spamdexing.
Just a point of clarification, and I do hope I don’t sound too much of a pedant! Yet it is important to point out that the title tag to which you allude, is actually an attribute of the link tag or href. The title attribute
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.1.4
Personally, I don’t think it hurts -I haven’t tested it – gut feeling is that it might add a miniscule degree of relevance, but would’nt have any huge impacts.
IMO – Its better to focus on the macro aspects rather than the micro.Afterall, it is possible to overdo this stuff and end up hindering ones efforts.
David,
One of the reasons you may be doing poorly with Google UK-specific searches is that your site maps to an IP address that is associated with Boston (in the US), according to a quick domain look up. Moving to a UK host may improve your UK results, but may hurt your US results. No way for me to know what is more important to you.
If you’re the adventurous sort, you could stop redirecting the .co.uk domain, get a host in the UK, and have both sites active. Adam Lasnik of Google once said in an interview on duplicate content, “But, more commonly we will simply see the UK version having the same text as the dotcom version. Now, we will endeavor to show the UK page to people that are browsing from UK, and the US page to people that are browsing in and near locations in the United States.”
Rob, not sounding pedantic at all. I’ll take a good read through that links page when I’ve more time on my hands.
Marios, thanks for checking those aspects for me. My offline promotions alone are bringing in a good number of UK clients, so setting up a separate .co.uk site isn’t something for the present. Interesting idea though.
Mihaela, great article. Cheers for pointing me there.
David, there’s a great article on seo at Pearsonified that’s helped me rank fairly high (number one in Google, even) on all sorts of weird topics even though I have a page rank of 0. For instance, when I wrote about an up and coming Shakespeare site, I ended up (briefly) ranking even higher than the site I was writing about – for their own tagline.
I think of Search Engine ranking as a fun little game now, trying to see how high I can get on obscure topics. I should probably try and do something strategic with it.
man i know the feeling. the first time i made it to the first page i was extatic. but like you said if that keyword is not a hot topic your still unreachable.
the term that i owned and still do is
“cyber thuggin”
my friend that i did the page for always comes up. but the bad part is that when i first made the page it was on wordpress.com not my own server and then i switched but the same post on the new site never comes up. Its important that you know where your home base is going to be cause thats where google will keep you.
Hi David,
I set up a .co.uk version of my website for the reason that I just didn’t appear in the google.co.uk results. My host is in Germany and I appear fairly high in google.com (and google.de) for my search term. I set a separate page up for the .co.uk version with the menu links back to the .com site. I display one of my rss feeds on the page so that the content is updating and not a duplicate of the .com. This has given me a presence in the UK search (3rd page), not as good as 1st two entries on page 1 that I get for the .com, but at least visable.
Regards,
Ian
Kinda along the lines of musicmixingguru and his “cyber thuggin” search phrase, I decided to try an experiment a few days ago…
I posted an article on Friday called "Lose Weight With RSS".
Now, the content of the entry is something I’d been meaning to post for several weeks now to serve as a jumping off point for several of our older readers who’re very inexperienced with web stuff. (I’ve been making a concerted effort to post these kinds of things to our blog rather than sending group emails.)
But the article title was something I chose to see how a frequently-searched phrase (“lose weight”) might affect my traffic. Anyway, it seemed like it could be an interesting exploration…
(However, it just occurred to me that this could be considered a John Chow-like “evil” scheme. Hmm…)
Ian S., thanks for flagging that article. I’ll be sure to check it out as I like what Chris Pearson is doing. Great work with your own rankings.
musicmixing, good point about self-hosted sites and the long haul. Before I recently moved my blog from the /blog directory I had a PR of 5/6 and some fairly well ranked posts. Thankfully my main domain wasn’t ranked too far behind so it’s not like I’m starting over.
Ian, you’ve got me thinking about setting up a .co.uk page that shows my most recent posts (and some links to this site). I don’t want to spend too long on it, and duplicate content is a definite no from what I’ve read. An option.
Rob O., the explanation video is superb. I posted the same thing a while back and point folk toward it if they don’t know the benefits.
Very interesting post. Actually I’ve been following your progress and noticed that for those keywords you’ve been climbing up the page in Google.
Something I’ve had success with in the past is creating a page that has the keywords in the file name; so, for example:
graphic-design-edinburgh.html
Some great resources in the post and in the comments too… I’m off to read up…
Great work on your SEO, making us search engine optimisers look bad by getting good ranking with minimal effort :)
With regards to you ranking for pages from the UK in Google, the culprit is probably your redirect from davidairey.co.uk to davidairey.com.
I noticed you are using a 302-redirect instead of a 301-redirect. The effect a 302 redirect will have will be informing Search engines that the redirect is temporary and you will be removing the re-direct sooner or later. Search engines will therefore not transfer any benefit from your .co.uk tld to your .com one.
Try changing the 302 to a 301-redirect (permanent). This will tell search engines the redirect is permanent and to transfer all benefit from http://www.davidairey.co.uk to http://www.davidairey.com. This should also include the benefit of having a .co.uk domain.
This solution works better if your .co.uk site was hosted in the UK.
Hopefully, this will help :)
Johno,
I agree with the creation of a page using the keywords. My previous post had them in the heading, although not on their own.
Perhaps I can create a page in the top nav bar with that text, but have the link text (what you see where you click) as something different.
Tolumi,
Thanks for the compliment, and for the recent email. I wasn’t aware that my redirect was coded like that, so cheers for pointing it out.
I’m not so clued in where redirects are concerned, and have needed the help of my host provider on more than one occassion.
I’ll check it out.
Tolumi makes a very important point re the redirect.
The permanent redirect is a must. I’ve read time and time again that search engines don’t take kindly to temporary redirects.
Very useful tips. Thanks for the information!
Thanks for your suggestions. I’m trying them out now, including this comment post!
Hey Justin! This is quite a coincidence! I’m in Odessa also!
How you knew there where 360 searches per month for that particular phrase?
I want to know that information from my keywords.
Regards.
Felipe
Impressive gain! Thanks for sharing the tips, I’m going to give them a go myself too :)
he he made me chuckle about not using ‘graphic design edinburgh’! ;o) interesting read, thanks
Hi,
Thanks for so much transparency. Guess it brings you good Karma.
You should update your update about your .com being back, by the way.
Yves, thanks for the reminder to update. Done.
Awesome!! Thanks to your advice listed here I was able to go from nowhere to the top page in 1 day!!! It doesn’t even seem possible, but that’s what happened. My goal search is “northeast ohio graphic designer.” You rock David, I really can’t thank you enough.
Nice one, James. Glad to be of help.
Thanks, David. This is some great information. I am just beginning to think about SEO and this gives me hope that I might be able to do well!
You’re very welcome, Dan. All the best with your own search engine efforts.
Wow! This is amazing! Thank you soo much for sharing it! Most people never share their sercrets or really good tips, but you, you are one of the best and most helpful webmasters, Thanks!
Hi David,
Thank you for providing this worthwhile information! I would add the importance of linking to authoritative sites, such as Wikipedia. I am not sure if linking to non-authoritative sites would enhance optimization efforts.
Moreover, while I understand that one must target keyword phrases with an appropriate keyword density, I would love to know where in the article such keyword phrases would best be utilized. Perhaps you can discuss this matter in a future article.
Thanks for your help!
Best Regards,
Andy Lax
Andy,
Funny you should mention linking to Wikipedia. I actually add the ‘nofollow’ tag to all mentions of that site, really because their outgoing links are all ‘nofollow’ too, and I’d prefer to pass more benefit onto other websites I mention on the same page.
I’ve not mentioned SEO here a while, but I’ll certainly keep your suggestion in mind should I do so in the near future. Thanks for that.
i have been trying for 6 months but no luck
David, I find myself referencing your website just about every day, as I find your articles very useful. Just wanted to say thanks.
Out of curiosity; I did a search for “graphic design edinburgh” to see how your site ranks today for local search. You show up in the #7 spot (although I live in the U.S., so my search results will most likely differ from yours). I notice your site doesn’t show up in the local business directory section. Is there a reason you haven’t added your site to google’s local business?
One of my friends won’t submit his site to the google/yahoo local directories, because he is worried that the search engines will try localizing his website. I doubt that’s the case, but it does make me wonder if it’s possible.
Thanks for your visits, Derek, and good question.
I suppose I don’t submit to local directories because my business rarely comes from my locality, but instead from overseas. Besides, had I submitted to Edinburgh, I’m unsure how a change of location would affect rankings, given that I no longer live there.
To one and all,
Wow – you guys make it sound easy to rank your sites, provided you stick at it and constantly maintain the content. This makes it difficult in real terms get any actual profitable work done!
Over 18 months ago and with no budget I used weebly to make my business site and listed it under as many free online directories as I could. I have consistantly received between 20 and 40 hits per day – but little real business.
I have concluded that it is now less effort to physically hand deliver business cards, press packs and even flyers directly to businesses I want to appeal to and therefore use google as a business name directory and not an advertising tool.
I fear as more and more sites appear search engines will become victims of their own success with the first three pages of any keywords typed belonging solely to T*sco!!
Yours jadely,
dave@upmcr.com
Hi Dave,
Sorry to learn your SEO efforts didn’t bear any fruit. Personally, things have been great for me (although the more I make statements like that, the less time it’ll take before I have another run-in with Google).
My advice is to publish a blog and to discuss issues important to the business you’re in.
All the best.
Hi David,
FYI, when one types “graphic design, edinburgh” (no quotation marks), your listing (as of 10/28) is neither on the first or second page, but second down on the third (I didn’t check Yahoo).
Perhaps a few graphic designers in the Edinburgh area took your advice, resulting in your displacement? Otherwise, I have no idea as to why this would happen.
Hi Alex, quite a while has passed since I published this post, and I no longer focus on Edinburgh-specific traffic (instead targeting a wider market). If you try searching for “graphic designer” I’m usually around position six or seven—in a Google.com search, anyway.
Thanks for your response, David – just thought you’d like to know.
It is incredible that you’re listed among the first 6 – 7 for the term “graphic designer”. I will be continuing to follow your sage SEO advice!
I do appreciate you saying, Alex. Thanks for that.
For a while there I had Logo Design Love on the first page for “logo design” but I’ve since slipped a little (2nd or 3rd page). That term is incredibly difficult to rank for. I believe there’s a lot of black hat SEO going on within certain top results.
Thanks for sharing. It is a great help to learn a few tips on how to rank well with seo.
Hi Dave I was trying to find info on getting to first page of yahoo and no one really has any! I found this site with google and I didn’t want to but I did implement the things on this page and I am am now on page 1 pos 10 for a high bankruptcy term, albeit for the loss of a low level term that I was in pos 2 for that got hardly any traffic.
So yeh great info, accurate too. If you have any more I am all ears ( Iwon’t tell anyone!)
Louis
I have no experience with SEO, but as a copywriter i’m quite lucky with some articles and a miss with others. I recently paid a company to create 500 back links for me and it was a total waste of money.
I’m also really hacked off with hundreds of automated back link comments flooding my site with totally unrelated comments from tinternet ‘entrepreneurs’ with bad English and dodgy products. I’ve got a moderator but it really does my head in…..any advice?
Madalena, I don’t know if this is still an issue for you, but a good anti-spam filter can really help, so that your moderator is the second line of defense and not the first.
I use Defensio for WordPress and I’m very happy with that, it’s stopped all spammy comments so far and has let real ones through.
David, interesting topics on your blog, I’ll be back! I also love your very clean, spare site design. You’d think that would be a given, but the number of portfolio sites by designers that look abysmal are legion, IMO.
Very intersting post, and relevant to designers who want their websites to rank highly, as we all do.
I had exactly the same issue with the my website at GraphicDesignPlymouth.com, which I wanted to target to the UK users and those in Plymouth in particular. It is hosted in Chicago.
The answer is to get a Google Webmaster Tools Account (free), and add your website to it so that you can get all sorts of additional information and alter settings. One of the things you can do is set a Geographical target for the site if it is a .com domain, under ‘Site Configuration’, ‘Settings’ menu option.
Just set the Geographical target to UK, and Google will promote it on the UK site.
The commentry given by Google is:
If your site targets users in a particular location, you can provide us with information that will help determine how your site appears in search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Country-specific domains, such as .ie or .fr, are already associated with a country or region.
When I last looked, the saite was in position 6 on both the UK and US sites for the term Graphic Design Plymouth