On November 1, 2007 we launched Promote My Site and on November 8th we figured out that Google Hated Us and on February 29th 2008 we woke up to find our site was now a PR3.  How did we do that?

Tiger?

Well, ok, maybe a bear cub.  But it feels very tigerish to go from the sandbox to having almost every page on your site in google's primary index.   Like when you hit a really good 3 wood off the tee box and you feel like Tiger even though your ball is 60 yards back from where his would land.

What Kind of Difference Has It Made?

A lot in terms of search results driving traffic.  We still post daily, and we get a fair number of people who come to the main site just to read the daily post, but more and more of our traffic is coming from people searching for terms that we put up on the white board six months ago and said: we need this traffic organically.

How'd You Do It?

It was pretty straightforward:

• Fill out the google form for recosideration
• Write good content every day
• Spend 1 month laying a base of decent inbound links
• Reply to every post with an incomming link

I don't think any of that is rocket science, but ti does require daily application and attention.

Dense Content

Not as in stupid, but as in longer posts predominate.  We have an average time-on-site of over six minutes and three pages.  I think our average post is 400 words, so that is about right in terms of reading speed.

I think that adding images and diagrams to our stories has also helped our readers.  I love a good Victorian novel but I know that sometimes when I hit a blog post that is a giant field of text, I just think, "I will read that later."  As if.  So we've tried to balance quick loading times with some visual relief.  But we've also tried to make sure that the images relate to the post in a useful or humorous way.  One of my favorite SEO blogs has these great pictures all over it but they're essentially eye-candy and don't relate to the story.  Which kind of annoys me while it puzzles me - if you're going to take that long to dig up a photo, why not get one that applies to the story?

Tools

We have seen a LOT of people coming to our site to use the tools (Digg Friend Finder, Backlink Pinger, and Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer) and they tend to stay on the site even longer than the readers.  We also see a lot them come back several times a week.  This is especially true for the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer - there is a great deal of SEO functionality goodness there, plus re-doing a store is an interactive/iterative process.

Linkbait

We haven't ever set out to write linkbait.  In fact, most of our posts are pretty boring to the general public - we are aiming for SEO business people and practioners  And while they will enjoy linkbait, and may even admire its creation, it doesn't speak to our need for legitimacy in our target marketplace.  So we don't do it. 

Having said that, we have put out some things that we knew would attract a lot of attention: a downloadable list of 2,162 social networking and bookmarking sites, reviews of some popular SEO software, etc.  But the goal of these posts was never linkbait, which I think is pretty obvious from how they were written.

Future Plans

Actually, while we will still be careful to target good inbound words for our customer base, we're not going to pay much more attention to page rank because it is only valuable to us for two reasons:

• Speaks to competency in our chosen field - would you buy SEO tools from a company that can't rank?
• Provides us the ability to target new keywords and get good organic search traffic from them to drive business

All in all, I have to say, the 29th was a good leap day for us!