How to get your blog in top google results!

[ÜberDan]

By accident I managed to get my blog as the top 2 results in Google!

Read my post here

Would be interested in any comments from SEO's in the know

[Jill]

I think you should post the information here, instead of making people visit your site for it. I imagine you'll get more response if you do. (Or perhaps you're just interested in the link?)

[JPX]

I don't mean to sound negative, and please educate me if I'm wrong, but how many people are actually going to search for the term "Dan McLean Blog". If I read your article correctly, that is the only term that got you in the top two. How exactly is that going to make you money? And like I said, if I missed something, please correct me. I am also here to learn.

[ÜberDan]

Jill thanks for the comment the whole post is below

JPX - Yes it worked for the search term Dan McLean which is not popular. What I was surprised with was the fact that Dan McLean was picked up at all by the search engines. The only reference to it is in the post by comment. I was curious as to whether a blog using a keyword they wanted to promote their site used it in that same way Dan McLean was picked up how much success it would have?

Original Post:

Browsing through my website statistics yesterday one of the search terms that brought people to my blog was Dan McLean Blog. I tried this search in Google and to my surprise Dan McLean was the top two results for this search! Not something I planned for so how did that happen?

It seems by recently changing my username for my Wordpress blog from Dan to Dan McLean, Google has obviously picked this up as a keyword for my blog, since my name appears under every blog as posted by. I’ve now changed it to Daniel McLean as below because I own some domains with that name and may use it in future.

This may be a very good way of using your blog and post username to good advantage. It could certainly increase keyword count and relevancy for your blog. Obviously Dan McLean has limited competition in keyword terms and using your post name as Make Money Online may not put you in the top 2 results for this popular keyword but it may help?

[ÜberDan]

Oh Jill just read your signature. So any relevance in my post or all small chips in the larger sheme of SEO?

[Jill]

Hi Dan,

You've got the right idea in that any words that appear on your pages (regular web page or blog page) become relevant to the search engines. After all, if your name is all over your page, it's obviously about you, and therefore should rank highly for your name.

Now, if there were hundreds/thousands of other people with your same name and they also had websites where there name was mentioned, you'd have a more competitive phrase and it would be more difficult for your page to rank well since you'd be competing with all the others (especially if you're site happens to be a lot newer than theirs and had a lot fewer links).

So, yeah, if you made your user name some keyword phrase instead of your name, it would certainly provide some relevance on the page for that phrase, but if the pages weren't really about the same topic, it would have less of a chance to rank for the phrase. Especially an extremely competitive phrase such as "make money online."

The trick, if you will, with SEO is to find the right balance of competitiveness for your keyword phrases. You want to optimize for phrases that people are actually searching for at the engines since it won't do you any good to rank for ones they aren't using. But, you also need to balance that out by choosing ones that 800,000 other sites have NOT already optimized for.

Because why would yours rank above theirs? There has to be a really good reason why your page is one of the 10 best out of the 800,000 others. For that to happen it takes years of building credibility and popularity.

By choosing keyword phrases that real people search on, but for which not quite so many have optimized, it gives you a much better chance of getting found in the search engines.

There's a lot more info on choosing the right keyword phrases in the keyword research section of my forum, which you may wish to check out. I also have a number of articles and past newsletters on this topic which you may wish to check out.

Hope this helps!

[ÜberDan]

Great info Jill many thanks, i'll have a read through your site

[greys]

Thanks for an insightful comment, Jill. Your HighRankins forum seems to be a great resource, will definitely have a look.

I'm trying to rank high for the "personal development", and have climbed to #6 so far (although I've seen my rank jump to #4 a few times, too)