I’m happy to report that even though this site is only 6 months old it is now on the front page of google for my chosen key phrase which is “local internet marketing”. I actually only checked because I noticed a spike in traffic from google, and I thought I would investigate. It took over a year for me to get the #1 spot on google for my site that focuses on customer experience , so it looks like LocalZing is doing quite well.

Thing I can attribute this success to are:

1. The blog format
2. Focus on a realistic key phrase
3. Attracting incoming links by with original writing

Blog Format

The blog format is absolute magic for SEO, because it’s regularly updated, it’s extremely easy for search engines to consume, and it has lots of built in meta-data and link building tools. One of the often overlooked technologies on blogs is “trackback”. Trackback is essentially a technology that automatically detects incoming links from other blogs and creates reciprocal links (I wrote more about trackback here: What makes the blogosphere so…. spherical.

Realistic Key Phrase

When picking your key phrase you should try and pick something that is realistic, is somewhat niche, and includes a broader key phrase that you would like to win. With Local Zing, ideally i’d like to be found under “internet marketing” but that’s a very competitive field, so I worked on a more focused phrase “local internet marketing”. I admit, Local Zing is a pretty easy one. But take my “customer experience” blog, there I started by focusing on winning “customer experience strategy” and once I had got that, customer experience was sure to follow.

Original Writing

Ok, well this one is not quite so formulaic or easy. First you should make sure you get familiar and read other blogs that are talking about the area you want to play in. Don’t fall into the trap of only reading popular blogs about “blogging”, then you’ll just end up getting caught up in the incestuous, self referential blog maelstrom, and that won’t do you any good. You’re much more likely to get linked to by like minded bloggers that are not inundated, and are actually interested in expanding on topics relevant to your business.