A Landmark Achievement In My SEO Efforts

This article was last updated on the 30 January, 2015, by Patrick Carpen.

As many of us may know by now, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the holy grail of internet marketing. If you master the art of rolling out well-written, well search-engine-optimized webpages to the top of natural search engine results, you can attract an avalanche of hungry buyers, ready to grab your product or service and eat it up.

Since over a year ago, I embarked on the study of Search Engine Optimization, with the aim of mastering the art, one simple step at a time. The rules were simple: build your site in a natural, user-friendly way, and Google and the other search engines will put your pages where they truly belong.

I decided to target a very simple keyword at first: one with very little competition, and one for which my website’s homepage deserved to be at the very first spot. That keyword (or keyword phrase) is “patrick carpen.”

My domain name www.patrickcarpen.com contains this keyword phrase. For the first six months of building and writing on my website, I kept checking Google for my keyword phrase “patrick carpen.” Sadly, for the first six to nine months, my website never appeared anywhere in sight when I searched for it on Google. However, within the first three months, my website appeared number one for “patrick carpen” on the Yahoo! search engine results. I came to the premature conclusion that Yahoo! search engine delivers better results and that Google search engine sucked. After all, I was following all the rules:

1. My homepage had 100% original content and contained a number of sporadic headings which included the keyword phrase “patrick carpen.”

2. A number of subsections of my site had pages with 100% original content linking back to the homepage using the keyword phrase “patrick carpen.”

3. My website’s pages were intelligently inter-linked.

4. All my pages were properly meta-tagged, and had great keyword density for other keywords as well.

But why was Google still being so stubborn? The answer is simple. Google is a machine: a software program, not a human being. But its intelligence rivals and perhaps surpasses that of the most intelligent human being. Google crawls every page of a site, checking cross-links, checking for original content and keyword relevance, as well as for steadily updating content. Using a set of of “algorithms”, the search engine software is able to determine how relevant and useful a page is to a user who is searching for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It then pushes that page to the top of the search engine result for its respected keyword.

Because of the importance, and profitability in making pages rank at the top of search engines, many people have been employing “tricky” techniques which feed misleading information to the search engines. For this reason, the writers of the Google search engine software need to monitor the web for these shady practices and kick those fraudulent pages down to the bottom.

After about 14 months, my website, patrickcarpen.com, started showing up somewhere in the 20th spot for the keyword phrase “patrick carpen.” Within 15 months, it pushed up to about number 15 spot. Within 16 months, I saw it at around number 5. Within 17 months, I saw my site at number 3 for the search term “patrick carpen.” Now, there were only two pages surpassing my personal website in Google for “patrick carpen.” One of those pages was my Facebook personal profile page and my Facebook professional profile page.

Today, I “googled” my name again and saw that www.patrickcarpen.com was at number one spot for the search term “patrick carpen.” I had done it! That is what I consider to be a landmark achievement in my SEO efforts. In fact, I thought to myself, that’s one small step for a website, one giant leap for an SEO professional. 

My conclusion of the matter then, is that, when it comes to delivering relevant results, Google still does a good job, if not a great one. It may be slow – for good reasons – but certainly sure!