Jentrepreneur

SERP Challenge for Two Blogs

I don’t spend too much time generally worrying about SEO. I don’t believe in mass-link-building (prefer my links naturally as much as possible), and it’s worked well enough for me so far.

However, I’ve noticed that a specific blog of mine (my freelance writing blog) was doing decently in the SERPs for a few pretty basic terms, and so I’m challenging myself to get top ten rankings for them.

Here are the sites:

AllFreelanceWriting.com
AllFreelanceWritingJobs.com

Note: The second domain was just broken off of the main domain a day or two ago, so it will take a little while to get in the SERPs at all, and all placements listed below are for the first domain.

Here are the keyword phrases (and current rankings):

Freelance Writing - 16
Freelance Writing Jobs - 11 (this result should hopefully be replaced by the new domain)
Freelance Writing Gigs - 8 6 (I’d like to get this in the top 10 with the new domain; preferably the top 5)
Freelance Writers - 17

I also target “writing forums” and “freelance writing forums” for a subdomain - writingforums.AllFreelanceWriting.com. It’s currently ranked 4 and 5 respectively for those terms. I’ve used the second domain above in the past, and it always ranked extremely well for the targeted terms, so I have high hopes for it (it’s why I revived it and pulled the jobs off of the main domain again).

Wish me luck.

EDIT: Not even 24 hours after I just posted my positions in the SERPs for these keyword phrases, and my blog seems to be completely wiped from the results for those terms (not de-indexed though). Now why the hell would that happen? It doesn’t feel like coincidence, but who knows? Can you think of any reason it would happen right after I posted here? I know Google’s completely wonky at the moment anyway b/c of the apparent pagerank update that’s taking forever to finish, so I’m hoping it’s something that just passes in a few days. I suppose we’ll see. If nothing else, I was reminded why I don’t waste a ton of time on SEO, and instead focus on more reliable traffic generation (like publicity, networking, and building word-of-mouth exposure by building a reputation in my niches). For the record… I despise Google… pretty much always have… probably always will.

EDIT 2: Some interesting updates:

1. The rankings have pretty much corrected themselves (updated numbers above for any that changed). Hopefully they’ll stay that way. (The new domain isn’t ranking at all for the targeted keywords yet.)

2. If they don’t, I’m fine with that too. While I can’t explain it, my traffic increased significantly for the first two days after disappearing from the SERPs, and then went right back to normal ranges thereafter - so the Google traffic lost was more than made up for by some good old fashioned promotion and word-of-mouth.

3. I do still despise Google. I’m not a fair weather fan. I also don’t have many plans to do a ton of SEO work other than trying to improve rankings on these few keywords. Quality content will definitely stay the primary focus.

Posted in Case Studies, Jenn's Work, seo | No Comments »

The Jentrepreneur Plan

This is my first in a collection of weekly posts to let you follow the progress of Jentrepreneur.com.

Long-Term Goals

• Have the old ChickTech.net content re-indexed on this domain, and back to top ten rankings for a few key phrases like headline templates, non-blog wordpress themes, non blog wordpress themes, magazine style wordpress themes, etc.
• While I’ll never be one to obsess over SEO, I do want to get the basics of my SEO house in order (titles, meta tags, tagging, etc.).
• Given that ChickTech was being ignored and pretty much completely dead on traffic when I stopped with it (less than 1000 uniques and 9000 pageviews per month), I’ll say I’ll start off with a goal of 3000 uniques and/or 25,000 pageviews per month for right now.
• I’m not currently setting monetization goals, as it won’t be a real focus for a few weeks - I want to focus on marketing first for traffic. (more…)

  Posted in Case Studies, Jenn's Work, Jentrepreneur | No Comments »