If you've not read Using Keywords, you might want to check it out. I made a pretty bold statement. Here's what I said:

Our keyword research indicates that it ["using keywords"] also a favorable search term and should be easy to rank for. We'll see. If this page doesn't rank on the top page of Google for "using keywords" by December of this year, I'll eat an entire spam loaf without anything to wash it down. (I hate spam!).

Well, admittedly, I gave myself some wiggle room by stating "by December" but that simply indicates how much I hate spam! A couple of interesting things happened for this promotion. (Note, every keyword that we write for is done as a campaign or promotion. It helps our clients understand the intentional aspects of writing for the web.)

So here's how we ended up getting ranked...

1. We did the keyword research, a process that I take all of my clients through. If you skip this, and especially if you are the new kid on the block, you probably won't get very far! Some people get lucky. Most don't! But you don't need luck anyway! I'd rather KNOW that I'm going to succeed the HOPE I well.

2. We selected a keyword that had a decent amount of traffic but was weak competitively. I know, you might be thinking but how do you know that. We teach it to every client! We even do it for them sometimes! Just know that it can be done!

3. We wrote the page on our website. We didn't do some things right and this is why this gets interesting. We did not optimize the page at all! Other than the fact that we used "using keywords" appropriately in context, and in the title and the url. There are no metatags, no keywords, descriptions etc that we tell all of our clients to fill in. Admittedly, that's a little hypocritical and we'll fix that. It can't hurt.

4. We COPIED the text on this page and created an article and submitted it. We did indicate that the original article was on Build a Web Shop. Within 2 days of submitting that article, the article showed on the first page of Google for the search phrase "using keywords". While that was extremely fast, I was a little worried. Again, I broke one of my own rules. If you're going to submit articles that essentially copy the content from your website, don't expect a lot. Google will not post duplicate content in their results. And why would they? The last thing you want when doing a search is 10 identical results.

5. Within a couple of weeks, instead of the article sites that we had submitted to showing up in the ranks, OUR SITE showed up on the first page of Google results. Alas, I don't have to eat a loaf of spam. Now I can't say that I recommend this. It happened but conventional wisdom will dictate that once someone beats you to the punch, replacing them with something very similar is extremely difficult. The right way to do what we did is to product TWO unique articles and let the one that you submit on an article directory PROMOTE the page on your site for the same keyword. I think the result would have been the same and possibly a little less nerve racking.

Greg Newell