January 2004: SEO live experiment update

Dear Reader,

I´m very exited this week, because I have good news about TheJungleMarketer´s first live experiment:

Climbing to the top of "mount Google".

First of all I´d like to welcome all new subscribers of TheJungleMarketer´s ezine and start with a short introduction to this experiment.

October last year I´ve still been a complete SE novice, i.e. I had absolutely no clue about how to design and promote web pages in order to achieve good rankings in the search engines.

Then I stumbled across Andy Williams´ site with his brand new newsletter about search engine optimization and I quickly got interested in the topic because Andy laid out every single step so clear that I became encouraged to try the SEO "game", too.

So the first thing I did is to chose a keyphrase which wasn´t too competitive: "internet marketing ezine" (2100 direct competitors) and redesigned TheJungleMarketer.com by following the step-by-step instructions in Andy´s newsletter.

By the end of November, Google had spidered my site and recognized the changes I´ve made. TheJungleMarketer went from nowhere to #445 for my chosen keyphrase.

Next, in the first two weeks of Dezember I searched for link partners to increase my link popularity. I also submitted my site to the Open Directory (some SEO experts say that Google gives more importance to sites listed there).

The Open Directory is a human edited directory of websites and it can be a long and tedious process to get listed there. The editor of the most appropriate category for my site does only accept big and long established sites and that´s why I´m still not listed there.

That´s ok, I mean - TheJungleMarketer´s ezine is still new and not widely known yet so I´m going to wait a few months, grow my community of loyal subscribers and add more quality content to TheJungleMarketer, wait for a couple of unsolicited testimonials and then try it again.

Fortunately, getting quality link partners wasn´t difficult. I picked up the free trial version of Arelis (Axandra´s reciprocal link solution), fed it with the URL of my #1 competitor and after a few seconds it came up with a list of sites who link to my competitor.

Then I took the time and visited all the sites (Arelis has an integrated browser which eases up the process) in order to pick out only the best link partners. In my eyes it´s well worth the time-investment as not only the number of links but much more the quality counts.

I quickly recognized the sites who had SE-spammy looking link partner sites with more than 100 links per page and deleted them from the list. even though they link to my competitor, it´s better they don´t link to me.

As I had only the trial version of Arelis I needed to find the contact emails and forms manually and also build the link page by myself, but I wanted to be sure that the SEO techniques I´ve been learning really work before I spend money on expensive tools.

10 out of 20 chosen partners accepted a link exchange, 3 of them have a PR of 4 or more on the pages where they link to me.

By the end of Dezember, Google had picked up most of the links and when I checked my ranking on january, 3 2004, I found my site on #5 for "internet marketing ezine" (with quotes).

However, searching for my keyphrase without quotes I still couldn´t find my site listed within the first 10 pages. Imagine how surprised I was when Andy sent me an email last sunday telling me that he found my site sitting at #2 for the term without quotes and #1 with quotes.

Go to Google and search for "internet marketing ezine" with and without quotes and check where you see TheJungleMarketer.com

I get #1 (with quotes) but a totally different search result than Andy (and probably you too) for the term without quotes.

Seems that Google delivers different search results depending on the local origin of the search request. Searching on Google.com from my location (Germany) for "internet marketing ezine" I get over 400,000 results and a totally different top 10 than Andy.

Considering that my PR (importance that Google gives to a site) is still 0 and that TheJungleMarketer has only a dozen of links pointing to it, compared with my competitors´ PRs of 4 - 6 and hundreds of links to them, you know why I´m satisfied with the result so far.
I´m planning now to go for more popular and also more competitive keyphrases.

Stay tuned - I´ll let you know when I see new results.

There´s still a very important detail about web page optimization that I didn´t tell you today but I´ll include it in the next newsletter - I promise.

your marketing friend,

Guido W. Stiehle
The Jungle Marketer


P.S.: I recommend You subscribe to Andy´s
search engine optimization newsletter
and also study the past issues while they are still available free.

I´ve just upgraded to the pro version of Arelis - I love it !
Download the free trial version:
http://www.Axandra.com

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If you found some information to be out-of-date, please contact me and let me know it.
support #AT# thejunglemarketer.com

Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

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