It's fascinating to me how quickly I can get a page ranked on Google. I'm not bragging here, sometimes it's downright tough! But the things that improve your ability to rank are not necessarily the things a local SEO guru can provide as a service. YOU have to want it. Here's a case in point from my own site, down to the exact detail - you'll soon see that there's no hocus pocus here, just brute force.
First: Find a subject
Ok, my website is about web management and SEO services but I can leverage a lot of my activity and be more useful than just providing those services. Here's the experiment that I wanted to try. Can I show up in Google for "Best Hotspots near the Dayton Mall"? It's internet related (so it's relevant to my website), it's something I can write about and it's practical.
Second: Structure your topic
My thought was this. When I'm looking for a free wifi hotspot I need to know three things:
1. Where in the area can I find it
2. How well does it work
3. How useful is it for my purposes
In the case of a hotspot, I need a convenient location. I'd perhaps like a cup of coffee at least. Good seating and tables big enough for more than two people let me spread out. I gotta have outlets to plug my PC into and most importantly, the wifi should be fast enough so I'm not sitting there all day pulling up a web page.
Third: Write
So, with that set of criteria in mind, I went to four hotspots near the Dayton mall. I actually did some work while at each one. While there I used netspeed.com to actually measure the speed of the hotspot. I also took note of the outlets available, the seating, amenities and suitability for business meeting. I used the same blogging software I'm using here (just another instance of it) and tagged each blog with location and venue and just simply wrote about the performance of each location. That blog is here: http://www.50bubbles.com/DaytonWiFiHotspots.aspx
Forth: Optimize:
I shouldn't tell you this but I will. Optimization isn't hard. It can be tedious, but it's not hard. Here's how I optimized my blog for hotspots.
Page Title: "Best Dayton Ohio Free Wifi Hotspots" (notice I got all the keywords in there.
Blog Title: "Latest Hotspots"
Individual blog titles: "Venue, Location, Speed". This isn't necessarily good optimization but it's great for someone looking for the best hotspot in the area. You don't even have to read the individual blogs for the most pertinent information. The whole point here is to be useful.
Blog tags: Blog tags are topics. I tagged with venue and location. That way someone visiting the page can easily drill down to their location of interest and then scan the blogs for best performance, etc. Blog tags are imminently useful if you use them correctly.
Metatags: I used my summary paragraph for the meta description. I typed relevant keywords into the meta keywords. Don't expect this alone to get you ranked! Google will skip right over them if they don't reflect what is on the page.
That's it!
I wrote 4 blogs in about an hour. That was yesterday morning: February 9th, 2015.
Today, February 10th when I checked I'm ranked 2nd for "best hotspot near dayton mall".
The bottom line is that there are a lot of things you can do to rank on the first page in Google. The one thing you can't do is ignore your site and do nothing. Google rewards effort!
