Page One Google In One Month

[lin robinson]

This had me scratching my head and the most knowledgeable webmaster in this area (not exactly a hotbed of webheads) is also baffled. Maybe somebody here has a clue.

A local businessman on this small Mexican tourist island who has NOT web experience, decided to do a website. Not for his hotel/shop. He heard you could make money with websites and wanted to try it out.

This guy is an exception to the usual Mexican business model: he's smart, flexible and profit-oriented. He brought in a local kid to do his site for him, and mentioned it to me when I dropped by to sell him some books. His design had some major problems that even I could identify and correct. It also had no keywords or metatags. The domain is a month old.

A week ago he told me he was on the first page of Google. I thought, Yeah, sure, you put in the name of your hotel and voila. No...he was number one searching the name of the island. The entire tourist destination. Up there with the top hotels and the big travel sites.

He is always on page one or two. He has keywords in his head now, but NO traffic, no backlinks, no content.

Anybody figure this one out?

[Joff]

What's the keyword?

[Solicitors Mortgages]

It's pretty common for Google to rank NEW sites higher than they should be.... then they dive away into the void of the web after a few weeks.

What normally happens then is (because they miss the notoriety and the traffic) they sign up to adwords, and google make a stack of money from them

James.

[lin robinson]

Ah sooooooo. That sounds reasonable. Thanks.

Because I've had a gut feeling this guy wasn't going to stay up there and he's obsessed with how well he's doing.

[davcheong]

It could the word meaning the keyword wasn't that competitive and there are few only whom will search on that keyword(which your friend mentioned to you). But in one month time it is indexed, well, your friend are really lucky one.


Thanks
David Cheong.

[Solicitors Mortgages]

Originally Posted by lin robinson

Because I've had a gut feeling this guy wasn't going to stay up there and he's obsessed with how well he's doing.

Yep, it's all pretty standard, I'll explain a little bit more. I started to build a site that covers basic SEO, within a week it was ranking 4th on Google.co.uk, now it's way down at 587th. This is because Google doesn't really know where to rank a site when it first appears - then suddenly it finds it's place, nowhere!. This is often refered to as the Google sandbox and generally you won't be seen again for a good 6-8 months. You can avoid the sandbox if you are ranking for a term that doesn't have many results at all (less that 100,000) or if you are using a domain that already has some age. In this example I thoroughly expect the site to do well in about 6 months as the domain was brand new when I opened it, but for now I know that it will not perform at all - so haven't developed it more than a couple of pages...I'm leaving it to age (if that makes sense).

It's fairly common to see people posting on forums about how well they've done in just a few weeks (as if they were an SEO expert) they then disappear, never to be heard from again.

Hope this helps.

James.

[lin robinson]

Yes, that's very helpful, thanks.

I passed this on the guy and told him to quit drolling over google (which I tell him every time I see him) and start building content and backlinks. I think this explanation helped convince him.


Another thing I got him do to tonight was to put on a bunch of links to local powerhouses. There is an English language forum on the island, and I know many travelers search for forums. So I told him to put up a link to it with "Isla Mujeres Forum" also to two destinations "Swim with Dolphins" and "Swim with Whale Sharks" the first time I ran him on a keyword development tool those came up as big interests.
I instinctively feel that this way will tend to swipe searchers who put those words in google.

Is this a valid thought? That putting links to hot keywords on your site will help in search performance?

I told him to start adding links to stuff like that, not worrying so much about the link URL itself, which can be changed or sold to the highest bidder later, but to get phrases like that on his page.

If there's something wrong with that mentality, let me know

Thanks again