Recently on Better Networker, a buddy of mine was having some issues getting a page to rank.

So for fun, I thought it would be cool to do a public SEO Case Study to see if we could get his page to move and teach folks a little somthin somthin about Search Engine optimization.

Herein lies the adventures which ensued … I hope you enjoy it!

We’ll start with his response to my questions about what the problem was …

@Richard Thanks for the public sharing initiative. This will be a great case study. My answers:

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First, what’s the keyword? (every keyword campaign will be different)
- buy camera valentine

What are the URLs for the external content? (articles, videos, etc.)
- all use keyword (see google)

What is the URL for the blog post?
- uses keyword (http://www.doonlinebusiness.info/2010/0 … t-special/)

What have you done in respects to SEO and overall marketing efforts? (be specific)
- seo’d blog title, description, keywords and url
- bookmarking (onlywire), article distribution, video distribution, press release, forum post (here)

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RESULTS:
I own the first 7 of the top ten properties on google in 24 hours (would be visible even now).
My blog ranks at # 48 http://www.doonlinebusiness.info/2010/0 … t-special/
Why # 48? When all these authority sites are referencing it…

This is my response …

OK, this should be fun.

1st things 1st … We’ll need to implement one thing at a time.
If you make too many adjustments at one time you skew the results.
So one thing at a time, wait, analyze, make next refinement.
Deal?

For the sake of this conversation ‘All In One SEO’ will be referenced by “A1SEO.”

** I am logged into my Google account and I have not cleared my cache.
So all of my search analysis is based on results as such.

Let’s get started…
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I took a quick peek under the hood and found this:
(for those following along … this is part of the code of the example page. You can see this by right clicking on the page and selecting “View Source” if you use Firefox, or simply go to “View” in your browser menu bar and select “View Source.”

exibit a)

<title>Buy a Camera for Valentine Day Gift with Special Offer | Do Online Business</title>

exibit b)

<!– All in One SEO Pack 1.6.10 by Michael Torbert of Semper Fi Web Design[451,517] –>
<meta name=”description” content=”Buy a camera for your valentine because cameras make the best Valentine’s day gifts. Here’s a selection of special Valentine models to choose from…” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”buy a camera for valentine, camera valentine’s day gift, camera valentine’s day special offer, canon powershot sd780 is digital camera (red), canon powershot sd1200 is digital camera (pink), canon powershot a480 digital camera (red), canon powershot a1100 is digital camera (pink), panasonic sdr-h80 60gb standard definition camcorder (red), kodak zx1 pocket video camera (red), flip video ultra camcorder (pink), creative labs vado pocket video camera (pink), sanyo dual camera xacti 720p hd vpc-cg10 camcorder (pink),business,marketing” />
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.DoOnlineBusiness.info/2010/02/09/buy-camera-valentine-gift-special/” />
<!– /all in one seo pack –>

Here is how Google displays your listing, which by the way holds the #39 position in my search.
exibit c)

Do Online Business » Buy a camera for your Valentine
Feb 8, 2010 … Buy a camera for your valentine because cameras make the best Valentine’s day gifts. Here’s a selection of special Valentine models to …
http://www.doonlinebusiness.info/2010/0 … valentine/

Your Title as Google Is Currently Displaying It:

• Do Online Business » Buy a camera for your Valentine

Your Title as It Is Actually Displaying OnPage:

• Buy a Camera for Valentine Day Gift with Special Offer | Do Online Business

Compare this to the top 5 pages listed (which are your content) and see what you see …

• <![CDATA[Buy a camera for valentine]]> on PodcastAlley.com — The place to find Podcasts
• Which Camera To Buy For My Special Valentine
• Which Camera to Buy for my Special Valentine : YouTube Tag camera
• Which Camera to Buy for my Special Valentine – AOL Video
• Buy a camera for your Valentine | BetterNetworker.com

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Let’s start there and look at what’s going on.
What do you see?

For starters, there is a clear discrepancy with what you want your Title to be and what Google is actually displaying. As you can see from the A1SEO code, you are not manipulating the title attribute as is available in A1SEO.

So let’s start there …
Use the A1SEO title field using this title: (precisely as written)

Buy a Camera for Your Valentine

Make that change and see what happens.

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There are several issues popping out at me right off the bat, but let’s at least start with the TITLE and see if your ranking moves.

I’m going to list out some of the other issues, but I recommend you ignore them, all but one, for now and see how the TITLE change affects things.

1. Your keywords. (suggest immediate change)
Assuming you are attempting to rank on Google as the priority, then subsequent search engines, and taking into consideration that Google pays little attention to the keyword tag (presumably) as a safe guard I would limit your keywords.

Using the data from your A1SEO code, your tag is:

buy a camera for valentine, camera valentine’s day gift, camera valentine’s day special offer, canon powershot sd780 is digital camera (red), canon powershot sd1200 is digital camera (pink), canon powershot a480 digital camera (red), canon powershot a1100 is digital camera (pink), panasonic sdr-h80 60gb standard definition camcorder (red), kodak zx1 pocket video camera (red), flip video ultra camcorder (pink), creative labs vado pocket video camera (pink), sanyo dual camera xacti 720p hd vpc-cg10 camcorder (pink),business,marketing

It’s overkill OR keyword stuffing.
And while your content may very well reference one or more of these keywords, your keyword theme or topical content is “buy a camera for valentine” These other words are supporting elements of the overall theme.

No matter what, in any case I never recommend more than a handful of keywords as your target.
2-3 is best per piece of content.

So I would consider cutting them all back down to just “buy a camera for valentine”
But like I said, one thing at a time is always better, so you decide if you want to do that now or not.

2. The topical nature of your site.
Your site appears to be mostly about “business” and doing business online ‘do business online’
Now all of a sudden you have a post about buying your valentine a camera.
This is merely a guess, but I would say “topically” your page in association with your overall site keyword theme isn’t very authoritative in this landscape.
And therefore does not command a dominate position.

If you look at the pages that are ranking…
The first 5 are related to your content, and are either your video or an article.

• www.podcastalley.com – Google loves this site. (did I just say that? )
• www.articlesnatch.com – crawled constantly, heavily indexed, again lots of Google luv
• www.channels.com – you have a listing, however the video is gone
• video.aol.co.uk – enough said
• www.betternetworker.com – well well well, looky there

So with that on the table, I would say it’s safe to say that Google really liked your video and article, or at least, really likes the sites you put them on and therefore indexed your content through those platforms. And as it is, they are all article or video syndication sites in their own respect.

3. Anchor Text and Overall Optimization …
I want to throw this out there and let you know there could be some considerable road blocks for this experiment. First of all is the fact that you already have everything out there, as opposed to starting from scratch.

So instead of designing a campaign, we are doing damage control and that makes things a little more challenging, especially considering the amount of syndicated content you already have out there.

That’s not an excuse by any means, but more a caveat so you know this may take more than just 1 or 2 tweaks to get things in order.

But I think you can definitely get the site to move , even make the front page.

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I have 2 more immediate suggestions, but I’d like to see what happens when you change the TITLE first.

So that concluded my response to Sandeep.

Here’s what he wrote the following morning …

@Richard, fantastic bro. This is exciting.

I’ve changed the title to “Buy a Camera for Your Valentine” as suggested. Now it exactly matches the heading and does not carry the blog name. In fact I knocked off the blog name from the A1SEO settings altogether. Let’s see how this impacts the rest.

Absolutely on dot about the anchor texts (which only use permutations of buy-camera-valentine-special-gift) which can’t be undone. Keywords have all the model names and can be removed once we’re within top 20. Let’s see. Thanks… will update.

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I DON’T BELIEVE THIS. IT’S BEEN 7 MINUTES SINCE I MADE THE CHANGE AND I RANK AT #3 ON THE “BUY CAMERA VALENTINE” KEYWORD

So there you have it …

One simple tweak and 7 minutes later, he went from page 4 to page 1 .

Well, I hope you get something from that. It was fun.

Live Long and Prosper.
~ Richard

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