Marketing blog challenge – first week
Filed under: Marketing blog challenge by Sasha on January 7, 2007
Couple of days ago I mentioned that I want to challenge my marketing (SEO) skills on this blog. I picked a very competitive term and I wasn’t really sure if it is smart to tell what it is but since I have nothing to hide here it is: “marketing blog”. This key phrase returns 199,000,000 at Google so it won’t be easy even to be in the top 1000. So my first marketing challenge is to get into top 1000. To do that I had to check how and why some of the pages are ranking well. I didn’t want to compare myself with number 1000; instead I’ve typed marketing blog again in Google and selected site positioned at 551. The URL of the site is: www.webinknow.com The site is quite famous but I didn’t see what it had to do with the term marketing blog. I took a quick look around the site and noticed that the word marketing is used a lot which is good since site talks about marketing an links to marketing blogs and sites. However, term marketing blog is mentioned only once, on one outgoing link anchor text. Words marketing and blog are used throughout the blog but it shouldn’t be a problem for me to do a better on site optimization.
Since off site optimization is more interesting than on site I fired up my favorite SEO tool which I won’t reveal right now and did an analysis. Analyzing my first opponent revealed these factors: 59.6% of his incoming links contain an anchor text “webinknow” which is good. It would be bad if it was marketing blog instead. I also discovered that 82.4% links point to http://www.webinknow.com/ ; some of the links are missing the last slash etc…
Deeper look discovered something interesting, 47% of the links are coming from the same ip address and 4 different ip addresses are “giving” ~ 83% of incoming links. This tool that I’m using (and it is free by the way) calculates link value of a link and webinknow.com has two links who give them 1.4 and 1.1 PR value. 6 of the strongest links give 4.6 PR combined.
Back to the anchor text, webinknow has 6 links that have anchor text “interesting blog” (notice the word blog) and two links with an anchor “blog” (well, at least it is not “marketing blog”).
My opponent has 35 links coming from homepages and 720 links coming from other blogs and forums which is good, since I think that most of my first links will come from.
Obviously I have done much deeper analysis then one presented to you but I figured that you don’t need all those boring numbers and facts that I have found. Speaking of my analysis tool I have to mention that these numbers are not to be taken with 100% accuracy, they are here just to make life easier.
What’s next? Well, first I’m going to do some link exchange just to get my blog up a little bit and I’m going to concentrate on content optimization which doesn’t mean that my content is going to be spammed with my key phrase, well maybe a little bit but I’ll try my best not to scare you away.
Next report is coming next week as it is weekly report so bookmark my marketing blog and come again. Thank you for your time.
January 7th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Great idea Sasha. Some suggestions would be to use marketing blog in the title of your posts, add marketing blog as a category and as you said ask for marketng blog links. I’ll give you one for what it’s worth. I used to work for the company that comes up number one for marketing blog, Top Rank. Good luck.
January 7th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Sasha,
Email me a link to that tool you used if you don’t mind. Thanks
Best Wishes
Paul
http://www.hipsterpad.com
January 7th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Thank you very much for a link David and for putting “marketing blog” all over your comment
I might change “Marketing challenge” to “Marketing blog challenge” or something like that, thanks for the idea. I could spam my title as well but I want it to look godd for the readers too so my weekly report will be titled “Marketing blog challenge - week xxxx”.
Paul, I will send you the link to this tool that I use. There is no secret about it, I just haven’t finished my “Tools” section so I decided not to publish any tools that I use
Thanky you both for your comments.
p.s. David, I didn’t analyze Top Rank yet but if I get close to them you are the first person I’m going to email about advice
January 8th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Sasha,
Thanks so much for doing this. What fun. I am really excited to see the results of this effort for you!
All the best,
David
January 8th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Sasha, one more thing. When you changed the title of the post, the link broke on my site and several of my readers complained. I have now fixed it…
David
January 8th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Hello David,
glad to see that people are interested in this. I really didn’t expect anyone to take me seriously right on the beginning…. Thanks for your post about the challenge, I belive it will help me. It would be better if you didn’t name it Marketing Blog Challenge but I forgive you ;). One site wide link would make me really happy you know?
January 10th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
[...] I have one goal and I wrote about it a couple of day ago at my blog. Here is the link to my Marketing Blog Challenge p.l.u.r. __________________ Marketing Blog [...]
January 10th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
[...] Three days ago I announced my marketing blog challenge and analyzed http://www.webinknow.com because I thought it would be interesting to compare my rankings with someone else. David Meerman Scott responded with a post about my challenge and he immediately realized that by doing so he would tweak his ranking for the term marketing blog. [...]
January 19th, 2007 at 1:29 am
These tips are a great way to keep track of links and their influence on incoming traffic. I appreciate the marketing blog strategy as well. many people can benefit from sharing and learning from content strategies.
January 19th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Hay Liara,
first of all thank you for your comment. I sure hope that people will benefit from my Marketing Blog Challenge. I believe this will be a great way for me to put knoledge into practice. Link to me if you like the challenge
Cheers
January 20th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
[...] Looking through top 1000 results in Google for the term marketing blog I’ve realized that David’s post about my marketing blog challenge reached the position number 182 while his homepage got up to position 386. Since David’s post about my marketing blog challenge has only a link from his homepage I am wondering what would happen if David gave me a homepage link with the anchor text “Marketing Blog”…. I guess I’m not that lucky to find out. [...]
June 3rd, 2007 at 4:27 pm
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