Keyword Search Engine Position Experiment – One Week Report

keyword position ranking experiment I love experiments. I try something…then I see what happens. It’s so simple, yet so powerful. If only experiments in high school chemistry were as much fun as doing experiments like this on the internet.

Last week, I initiated my keyword position experiment, implementing various strategies to rank as high as possible for the specific keyword phrase, passive income streams, which I was unranked for when this experiment began. Below is a detailed report of exactly what I did and when, and what my Google keyword position was at that time.

The experiment officially began with my blog post entitled Passive Income Streams 101, which included an embedded YouTube video, with the same title. FYI, the keyphrase passive income streams is searched for approximately 1600 times every month. Here’s the log:

Keyword Position Log for	Passive Income Streams
Tuesday, 10.20.09
3:08pm	Blog post published	n/a
3:10pm	Tweeted about the new blogpost using keyword "Passive Income Streams"	n/a
3:12pm	Posted about blog on Facebook Fan Page	n/a
6:10pm	Bookmarked on Digg	n/a
6:12pm	Bookmarked on StumbleUpon	n/a
6:14pm	Bookmarked on Delicious.com	n/a
6:20pm	Bookmarked on 25 sites via Socialmarker.com	n/a
8:15pm	Checked status: Tipd.com bookmark was #61 Blog post was #74.	74
9:45pm	Checked status	30
Wednesday, 10.21.09
12:00am	Checked status	27
1:00am	Uploaded to 5 video sites via TubeMogul.com	27
9:00am	Checked status	27
Thursday, 10.22.09
9:00am	Checked status	25
12:00pm	Wrote eHow.com Article	25
8:00pm	Checked status	25
9:00pm	Bookmarked eHow.com Article via Socialmarker	25
Friday, 10.23.09
9:00am	Checked Status	25
12:00pm	Checked Status	25
6:00pm	Checked Status	25
9:00pm	Checked Status	25
Saturday, 10.24.09
9:00am	Checked Status	15
3:00pm	Created a Squidoo Lens	15
5:00pm	Article submitted to EzineArticles.com	15
6:00pm	Article submitted to GoArticles.com	15
9:00pm	Checked Status	15
Sunday, 10.25.09
9:00am	Checked Status	9
12:00pm	Checked Status	9
7:30pm	Article submitted to ArticleAlley.com	9
11:00pm	Hub created on HubPages.com	9
Monday, 10.26.09
All day	Checked Status	9
Tuesday, 10.27.09
All day	Checked Status	9

keyword-position-ranking

note: my keyword position may have changed since writing this article

I reached the first page in the first week, which is great, but is somewhat expected because I ranked so high already for the keyword passive income. That being said, it was not easy. A lot of things had to happen to get there, as you can see.

Many times, I’d find myself in a plateau, but after implementing something new, I’d move up again the next couple of days. This just shows that these kinds of things do work. Here is some more detailed explanation about some of the things I did:

The Blog Post

I included the keyword phrase, passive income streams in the title. This is a no-brainer.
I made sure the URL also contained the keyphrase.
I included the keyphrase in the description in the All in One SEO plugin for this post.
I also included the keyphrase in the first sentence of the blogpost, which is also a must.
I bolded the keywords every once and a while in the body of the blog post as well, which has been said to help in the past.
I embedded a YouTube video, with the same title, into the blogpost. I also linked to it using the keyphrase as the anchor text.
I also included a relative picture, which is named “passive-income-streams.jpg”

Social Networking

I immediately Tweeted and Facebooked a link back to the blog post as soon as it was published. I made sure to put the keyphrase into my tweets and Facebook posts. If you lookup “passive income streams facebook”, and “passive income streams twitter”, my name or website shows up near the top, which means it’s doing something for it.
Blasting it out on social media websites at least increases the visibility of your post, which gives it potential to be linked to by other people on other websites.

Social Bookmarking

When bookmarking the blog post, I made sure to write a title, summary and tags that all contain the keyphrase.
Bookmarking on Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious should be done manually, and very carefully. If abused, your account will be banned rather quickly. Luckily, I have a history with these websites with normal activity, so bookmarking this new blog post was not an issue.
On other sites, I used the tool SocialMarker to make bookmarking a little easier for me. It’s not entirely automatic (like Bookmarking Demon is), but it’s a lot faster than dealing with each site individually.
Again, this creates backlinks, as well as increases the visibility of your blog post.
Note that you can also bookmark your YouTube video or any related articles, which will all help your campaign in one way or another.

Video Syndication

I submitted the video to 5 video websites similar to YouTube.
I used TubeMogul to make this process a little easier for me. It allows you to upload your videos to several video websites all at the same time. Depending on what kind of content you are uploading, you may or may not be restricted to upload to certain video sites.
Again, I made sure to title the video passive income streams, as well as put that into the description, using html to create an anchor text with the keyphrase in it pointing back to the blog post.

Article Writing

Article writing is different than social bookmarking because you’re actually writing new content and publishing it on another website.
For this particular keyword, I’ve written new articles on eHow, eZineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleAlley. I do plan to do more.
For eHow, it has to be in the form of a “how-to” article, which is why I wrote How to Create Multiple Passive Income Streams. I also included pictures with the keyword as the file name, and I social bookmarked this article like I did with my original blog post. Of course, I added links back to the blog post in the Resources section at the bottom, using the keywords as the anchor text. I even included a link to the YouTube video as well. Be careful though – if your article isn’t in a how-to format, or just seems spammy, they will not hesitate to delete it.
For other article sites, you can write whatever you want, although you still have to provide something unique and non-spammy. I wrote a new article entitled, Passive Income Streams and The New Rich, which I’ve submitted to a number of these sites. In the “about the author” area at the bottom, I include a backlink to the original blogpost using the keyphrase as the anchor text.

Squidoo and Hubpages

Squidoo and Hubpages are unique websites that sort of allow you to easily create a webpage from scratch. Instead of dealing with HTML and blogging platforms, you can basically drag and drop different “modules” together and customize your own page. You can also share revenue on the ads that are placed on the site as well, or donate them to charity, which is pretty cool.
On Squidoo, I created a “lens” (their name for a page) called passive income streams, which pulls an RSS feed from this blog, includes a few of my YouTube videos, as well as other links and resources about passive income. Of course, I’ve also included backlinks to my original blog article using the keyphrase as the anchor text.
On Hubpages, I’ve basically done the same thing, with a page I created entitled passive income streams business.

Summary

All of these techniques are great for ranking higher in the search engines because they do help in one way or another. However, they do take time. Much of this can be done by someone else, such as virtual assistant, if you have one to work with.

The nice thing is that the strategies that you implement now will forever keep working for you and your blog. It’s the perfect kind of thing for getting free traffic for any type of passive income stream you may have working for you.

After all of that, I’d love to leave you with one last piece of advice. The best thing that you can do if you want to rank higher in the search engines for a particular keyphrase (especially one that is fairly competitive) is to write a killer blogpost that provides excellent, unique content that others would be crazy NOT to link to and tweet about. If done correctly, you may not need to implement all of the strategies that I’ve outlined above. This is how I was able to make a living online and not spend a dime on advertising.

I’ll keep working at it and shooting for that #1 position, and I’ll report back with more results soon. I really hope you’ve enjoyed this post and found it useful.

Thanks, and I wish you nothing less than success. Cheers!

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Posted on : October 28th, 2009

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42 Comments (Click Here to Leave a Comment Below)

Reply Oscar - freestyle mind on October 28th, 2009 at 10:26 am

This is freaking awesome! Thanks for sharing with us. By the way I see your post on the 6th position right now.

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Hmm..I think it depends on where you’re located. That’s awesome though. Thanks!

Reply Arshad on October 28th, 2009 at 11:32 am

very nice Pat.Make sure to look at the “incoming link” sources in case you want to try niche blogging.Because link bait and article writing may not be enough for micro or even niche blogs.Link building becomes very essential in such cases.This experiment is really good.Hope to see more posts of this genre in your blog.

Take Care,
Arshad.

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Ahh, thanks Ashrad. I’ll look into that. Thanks! I appreciate the advice =)

Reply Glen Allsopp on October 28th, 2009 at 11:35 am

Hey man, nice in-depth post.

Congrats on ranking so quickly. I guess that shows the power of a little effort and an already strong brand.

I’m curious to know what software you used for that ‘log’?

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Thanks Glen! For the log, I used the wordpress plugin WP-Table Reloaded. Just imported an excel file. Super simple.

Reply Marty Green on October 28th, 2009 at 12:10 pm

Another Awesome post Pat! I’m going to keep refering back to this as a template for me in the future.

I have a lot to learn still, but you are leading me in the right direction. Thank you.

Marty

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 12:24 pm

Thanks Marty! And also, thanks for the retweet

I’m still learning too, but I’m definitely going to keep everyone updated, so look out for more stuff like this soon!

Reply Dustin | Engaged Marriage on October 28th, 2009 at 1:40 pm

Excellent post and great summary table! I am confident that you will end up in the top 5.

One question: I had assumed the All-in-One SEO plugin did all the work for you in the background once you put in the info in the general inputs for it initially. Based on your post, it sounds like you need to actually input information to the plug-in for each post? If so, should I go back to each of my older posts and do this?

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

Hey Dustin,

Well, it does do the work for you in the background, but you can override it on individual posts if you want to. For this, I wanted to make sure “passive income streams” was in the description.

Typically, the plugin will be able to pick up the keywords that you want it to, but sometime it doesn’t. I did this just to make sure.

Reply Kim on October 28th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

Pat, your eHow and passive income articles are some of the most helpful resources anywhere. Thank you for being so generous with your great passive residual income information. I’ve even suggested a few friends follow you. You will be on top in no time with this innovative strategy of openly sharing valuable data!

Reply Hynek Palatin on October 28th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

Pat, this is great. I can also see your post on the 6th position.

I am actually doing something similar (who isn’t and I am currently ranking #4 for my keyword phrase, but it took several weeks.

Reply Brian on October 28th, 2009 at 4:10 pm

I agree with everyone; excellent progress report and excellent job climbing the SERPs. You touched on it in the post so I thought I’d bring it up; you already ranked well for “Passive Income”, “Passive Income Streams” is a long-tail of the shorter term thus it should be easier for you to rank for.

I think an experiment on a term which is not a derivative of your already ranking keyword would be equally interesting.

Another thought is that many of the inbound links you’ve obtained are nofollow links and many of them are not yet indexed. Your Goarticles article for instance. I would imagine throwing a few backlinks at the nonindexed articles would help them index quicker and would help your SERP rankings for the passive income streams article.

Reply Brian on October 28th, 2009 at 4:27 pm

My appologies, your Goarticles article is indexed after all. Good job.

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 4:29 pm

Hehe, thanks Brian. I was pretty sure it was, but then I went to make sure and yeah it is indeed indexed. In my research, however, I found out about another article website that is apparently pretty good, buzzle.com.

Thanks Brian!

Reply Julia on October 28th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

Hey Pat,

Congratulations on this. I’m wondering about a few things related to this, based on your experience:

1. Was 1600 searches a month the exact or broad number of searches?

2. Do you find that the Google Keyword tool is fairly accurate relative to the number of visitors you get, assuming you rank highly for the keyword?

3. What percentage of people typical get to your money page from your posts or index page? I know you don’t have one here yet, but for Green Exam Prep.

Thanks as always for the first hand results! They are so helpful to newbies like me trying to make a living as you have.

Best,
Julia

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 5:56 pm

Hey Julia!

1. Actually, I was using Market Samurai to give me the numbers, but the Google Keywords tool is telling me something different. The broad is about 3600, and the exact is about 500.

2. In my experience, the Google Keyword tool is indeed fairly accurate. Now, I’m thinking about my Exam website when I say this. I haven’t really started looking into it for this particular blog until recently. Of course, even if you’re at the top you will only get a percentage of the search volume to actually click over. Of course, the 1 spot is the best.

3. In the past, it’s been between 2 and 3%.

All the best to you! Cheers!

Reply Julia on October 28th, 2009 at 6:40 pm

Thanks Pat!

When you say 2-3%, do you mean that 2-3% of your total visitors convert to buyers? Or 2-3% of the people that visit your homepage actually make it to your sales letter?

I ask because I have a sort of “blog-type” main page as you do and am wondering what percentage of all visitors will actually get to my sales letter…

Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 8:12 pm

Hey Julia, to be a little clearer, About 8-10% of my visitors make it to my sales page. About 2-3% of those actually make a purchase. It fluctuates, and there are obviously ways to improve these numbers, some of which are far easier on a “blog-type” website. For instance, in your RSS feed, through your comments and interactions, etc.

Reply Vance on October 28th, 2009 at 6:20 pm

Pat,

Thanks for bursting my bubble! Just when I thought I was covering all my bases as far as publicizing my content goes, here you go and drop all these ideas I didn’t even know about. Thanks for sharing all your techniques. I will definitely try some of them, especially the video distribution tips.

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Hey Vance! My pleasure!

Sorry to burst your bubble =P

Reply passive family income on October 28th, 2009 at 8:06 pm

Pat – That is a great summary you provided. The one thing I have never doe is the YouTube video which I think I may try.

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 8:13 pm

Definitely, it seems to work fairly well, especially when syndicating the content elsewhere. Let me know when you have a video done, i’d like to check it out

Reply Pat on October 28th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
And tweet it out for ya =)

Reply steve on October 29th, 2009 at 6:04 am

Hi,

Nice test you have going on, i have my first website built and was wondering what did you use for the log to show you them results?

Sorry if its a silly question but like i say i have only just completed my first site.

Thanks
steve

Reply Pat on October 29th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

Hey Steve, congrats on your first website. I wish you all the best of luck with it!

For the search engine results, I actually used http://www.kpmrs.com/index.php, and just checked that every once in a while, and documented it in a Google Doc as I was going along.

Reply steve on October 30th, 2009 at 5:46 am

cheers for the info Pat and the kind words!! I wouldnt of been able to do it without websites like yours. So keep up the good work..

have a great weekend

Reply pbushx2 on October 30th, 2009 at 9:03 am

Hi Pat
Thanks for the informative article. I love it, and will apply some of your tactics to my projects going forward. I’d love to see you follow up on this in a few weeks.
Also, at the moment, your original post doesn’t seem to be ranking. I suspect it will bounce back in the next several days, as I’ve seen this happen with other sites/pages in the past. If it does NOT bounce back, though, this might be a better learning experience, if you can figure out what went wrong with the experiment. (isn’t that the definition of experiment?) Whatever happens, I’d love to hear you follow up in the future. Thanks for taking the time to share this info.
Regards,
Another Pat – pbushx2 from IBMA

Reply Menandro Tomas on October 31st, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Once again you over delivered Pat! Bravo!!!

Reply James on November 2nd, 2009 at 1:05 pm

Good stuff Pat,

I like the last point about creating high quality posts, that is the foundation of ranking high and staying there.
keep it up….

Reply Stuart on November 2nd, 2009 at 2:42 pm

Excellent post, will be referring to this to anyone who’s doing a blog

Socialmarker.com is SUCH a bore, I think it takes me around 90 mins to do all the bookmarks (one’s which work that is), I’ve never got into the videos at all, do you just knock up any old vid?

Reply Blog Traffic Exchange on November 2nd, 2009 at 5:13 pm

You should join the blog traffic exchange…

3 of the current top 10 are members and ahead of your post. (at least by my Google search from northern California.)

Reply Lazy Man and Money on November 2nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm

It would be nice if there was a control to this experiment – though that’s a very difficult problem. As you said at the outset, it’s not surprising that you’d rank in the top ten.

It’s hard to tell if the social bookmarking helped or the domain itself. It’s hard to tell if the eHow worked or why it took so long.

I find some sites ahead of you from people I know personally who aren’t doing any of all the extra submitting and don’t have the domain name either. So maybe seasoning could have a large effect?

Reply Claudia / Diet on Autopilot on November 3rd, 2009 at 5:03 am

Good experiment and everyone can take some advice from that! I found that my rankings also depend quite a bit on the overall number of backlinks to my blog (not just to that specific post).

Reply Cat on November 3rd, 2009 at 10:21 am
You are awesome. Thanks for posting this!

Reply joe on November 5th, 2009 at 5:29 pm

That’s great but… I would imagine no one is searching for “passive income” let alone “passive income streams”. I know you said approx 1600, if you got that from google kwt, that thing can be way off. Helpful experiment nonetheless.

Reply Jafri on November 12th, 2009 at 3:25 am
I think this is the information that I was looking for: Thanks in all aspects pat.
Reply Ian on November 13th, 2009 at 4:49 am
Pat,

You are the man! Every time I visit your site I learn something new and useful that boosts my internet business.

Thank you.

Reply Mike on November 14th, 2009 at 3:55 pm

Pat, have you thought of collecting emails at your Green Exam Academy? The people who don’t buy from you now might want to buy later. The people who do buy might be interested in other offers you make later.

How much traffic did you have before you put together your ebook? Was your traffic strategy *only* forum posts/responses and natural search placement from unintentional keyword relevance? You mentioned in the interview visitors found your “notes” without you even knowing it and you began getting traffic from keyword-rich “notes”.

You mentioned the “LEEDS” people might be creating their own study guide. Have you approached them about adopting yours, since it has traction and approval? Just a thought.

You offer great information and respond, easily explaining why this blog continues growing in popularity. Good for you!

I heard your interview with Yaro Starak.

Thanks, Pat!

Reply Deborah Richmond on November 24th, 2009 at 7:41 am

Your willingness to share such great information astounds me. You clearly know what it is we really want to know. I’m still amazed at your income reports, that you are that open with them. I too am learning transparency. You seem to have it down. I’d love to hear more about your transparency efforts and whether you’ve had some down sides. Because of course that’s what we’re all afraid of.