A Juicy SEO example

Search engine optimization is a big part of what we help our clients with and I know there is a lot of skepticism surrounding internet marketing firms and the use of their own tactics. In light of this, I thought it would be helpful and interesting to share a recent success we enjoyed using a very common tactic we use to leverage articles to gain long tail search terms.

On May 6th, 2010, twelve days ago, I posted a short blog post titled “What is a content asset?” Admittedly, not an extremely competitive key phrase, but a term with moderate competition (26 million results in Google), that is used regularly in internet marketing.

I created and optimized this phrase for the term that I titled the post, “what is a content asset,” and built just a few links to the page (about five).

Less than two weeks later, I noticed the term in our top ten search engine keywords in our traffic sources. So, I started to review the rankings and this is what I found.

Google
#3 for “What is a content asset”
#4 for What is a content asset (no quotes)
#12 for content asset

Yahoo
#1 for “What is a content asset”
#1 for what is a content asset
#6 for content asset

Bing
#1 and #2 (via Linked In) for “What is a content asset”
Not in the first four pages for content asset.

And, I expect these rankings to improve as we build more links to the article.

To recap, here is the process I used for posting this article:

• Create a WordPress blog post, using an SEO plugin to set the page title and keywords.
• Matched the page title, URL file name and H1 tag exactly to our keyword target: what is a content asset?
• Linked to the post with two Twitter accounts, one Linked In account, one Facebook link and one Digg link.

I did this all in about an hour. Then, I moved onto other business unrelated to this post—only to be brought back to analyze this post because it came up so high in our traffic sources so quickly. I’d like to point out that we write articles like this all the time, some of which rise to the top while others do not. But, it’s this collective and fragmented keyword strategy that brings us our complete traffic. Frankly, we are unsure which will be the home runs, so we make lots of concerted efforts to increase our likelihood of winning.

This is a concrete example of the work we do for our clients, and a big part of our own internet marketing.

Success came from identifying related keywords to our market, generating an optimized article and building quality links to that page. Assuming that we have the right call to actions that will lead interested lurkers into buyers or subscribers, we’ll be earning a respectable return on our investment on this content asset soon.