I didn’t expect these results in one week, but here it is.

I was showing that completely ignoring the keyword metatags will have little effect on search engine placement.  On this page I tried to optimize the page for “Diamond Studded Widgets” and nothing else.  Here are my current rankings:

When searching for “Diamond Studded Widgets”, my page is . . .

Google: #1
MSN Live: #1
Yahoo: #5

Today is July 10, and I see the first ranking for the Diamond Studded Widgets page. Microsoft’s Search Engine gives the page a number one ranking for the keyphrase, “Diamond Studded Widgets.”

In three days, the page went from not existing to a number one ranking. Good news is that was easy. Bad news is that no one is making money selling diamond studded widgets, and no one is searching for diamond studded widgets. If we had tried the phrase “injury lawyer,” I doubt we would have seen such success. Why not? Because there are thousands of attorneys that would love to be number one for that phrase. Many are optimizing their sites to be successful for that phrase.

We see that Search Engine Optimization is competitive. No matter what we do, we have to compete with our competition. I’ll spend several posts describing what made that page appear so fast.

Today’s important SEO lesson: The text of links into a page are very important. The page we are working with doesn’t have any keywords or metatags to make is a success, but it does have something important. Links in.

Who would link to that page? Well, I would. I placed links to that blog post on three websites that have success in search engines. The links in read, “Diamond Studded Widgets”.

or coded (This is a single line, wrapped.):

<a href='http://blog.handsomeweb.com/2008/07/07/
diamond-studded-widgets-and-keywords/'>Diamond
Studded Widgets</a>.

Search engines value the text in your links in.

Now, go get ranked.

Gerald hired the perfect web designer for his site.  His site is beautiful, loads fast, and represents his business with a memorable, professional presentation.  But the expected jump in sales leads doesn’t happen in the first month of being on the web.  Gerald calls his web designer and asks if there is something wrong with the web site.

Diamond Studded Widgets

Gerald sells diamond studded widgets, but when he types, “diamond studded widgets” in Google, his site isn’t there. He asks, “Did you put in the right key word?”

The quick answer is, “Yes.” But the complete answer is, “Yes, but that won’t help.”

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The majority of my clients don’t want to talk about search engine optimization before I start on their website, and several of them are surprised they are not atop the Gooogle rankings for their favorite search term on the day their site goes live.  I am not joking when I say, “many clients expect to be all over Google on the day their site goes live.”

I’ve had a good bit of success with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for several of my clients over the past few years.  I’ll be sharing some of what I have learned here in this category, but I won’t tell ALL of my secrets.

I’ll start with the most important lesson about getting good search engine rankings.  It is not something to learn, but something many new site owners need to unlearn.  Keywords have absolutely NOTHING to do with your Google ranking and very little to do with ranking at other search engines.

The web is frought with “keyword generators” and “metatag machines.”  But that doesn’t change the fact that Google ignores your keywords.  Quit thinking, “Keywords,” and start thinking “optimization”.  I’ll talk about optimization in later posts.

Experiment #1: I’ll try to get this page ranked on Google for diamond studded widgets and not change the keywords. Today is July 7. Give me a couple of months and we’ll see if it works. I hope I can beat this diamond studded phone.