Whenever I attend a seminar these days, I’ll look for one of the top speakers to start speaking, take a picture of him or her, make a blog post and see if I can get top positioning on Google by the time they’re done with their talk. Sometimes it works and sometimes it takes a bit longer like 2 hours or so for the posting to appear. But, it does appear and always within the same day. So, I thought I would share the process of exactly what I do to make that happen.

The subject is Brian Jud. Brian is a semi-famous book marketer who educates people how to sell books to retail stores and other outlets. In the authoring and book marketing industry, he is considered one of the greats. Here is my first screenshot that simply shows that I really did attain a #1 positioning on Google for the term. You might get a different result depending on what IP address you’re on and in what part of the country and of course whatever preferences you have set within Google. But here’s the screenshot anyway where, as of today, searching for “brian jud presenting” or “brian jud speaking” brings a search result in the top position pointing to my WebsiteWaves.com blog.

So, how did we get there? Through a series of steps. For the past two years, almost all websites produced by HereNextYear as well as those I’ve churned out on my own have used a content management system called WordPress. My WebsiteWaves.com blog is in WordPress as well. Here is what it looks like on the inside where I made the post:

There were 6 steps I had to take to have any hope of getting my post to display even close to the #1 position on Google for those search phrases. As shown above, I had to:

1. Create a headline for the post that had “Brian Jud” early in the headline wording. Since I wanted to make sure I got positioning for “Brian Jud Presenting,” I created a headline that also had the word “presenting” in it.

2. I created a url that had “brian” and “jud” in it so that Google would see this page as being related to him somehow. If the phrase was more competitive, I could’ve further optimized this page by making the url “brian-jud-presenting.html” but apparently just “brian-jud.html” was enough in this case.

3. Instead of having a file name for my photo of brian be something like 08212010-a1.jpg like lots of digital cameras will create by default, I changed the name to have “brian” and “jud” included.

4. The content of the post itself didn’t need to be very long, but it did need to include “Brian” and “Jud” early in the content and mentioned somewhere else in the paragraph as well. So, that’s using the same keyword phrase without being overbearing or unnaturally stuffing keywords into the content.

Then, to further optimize my post, I scroll to the bottom of the WordPress blog post page where I’ll see two more steps.

5. I created a keyword targeted “Page Title” of “Brian Jud Speaking | Selling More Books to Retailers by Brian Jud.”

6. Then wrote a complete sentence that becomes my meta description line. Both the Page Title and the Meta Description are what shows up in Google when you do a search.

Notice that I didn’t even enter any keywords in the “Keywords” section. Because people have abused the keywords area so badly for so long, Google barely even recognizes them anymore. It doesn’t hurt to throw some keywords in there, but I just wanted to prove the point that you can get pages of your website on top of Google’s organic search results in under an hour without ever adding a single meta keyword.

But, the process is not over! In fact, we’ve only setup the page so that Google “can” recognize it. The next step I took was to add my post to Ping.fm so that a message can immediately be sent to all of my social networks. Here’s a screenshot from within ping.fm:

Notice how in the circle, there is a list of all the social networks I’ve added to my ping.fm dashboard. Then I’ve underlined the message with the url of the blog post. Ping.fm will automatically convert that url into a short url, which is fine. The instant addition of my post is what is seen by anyone connected to me. Maybe even more importantly though is that Twitter is one of Google’s main sources for what’s called “Real Time Search.” I’ll talk about that in another post, but let’s just say, it’s yet another way Google finds out about up-to-date information posted online…immediately in real time.

Then, when I hit the “Ping It!” button, the message is sent out to the networks and looks like this on Facebook as an example:

Notice how it was just barely noon by the time I had someone making a comment to my facebook post. I think it was about 10:15 am that morning when I took the picture of Brian. It took another 20 minutes or so getting the photo into my laptop and formatting it, then making a post. At 11:30, I searched Google for “brian jud presenting” and there it was. Then the comment came in.

So, that’s how it works. I swear I should just sit around all day and make blog posts. But, this isn’t about “me,” it’s about what YOU could do with information like this. Of course, first you need to get setup with WordPress by someone who knows what they’re doing. Then, find what people are searching for related to your industry. Then, make all the blog posts your fingers can handle!

And, one day soon, you too will be able to tell ME how YOU got a #1 search position on Google in under an hour!

All the best,
Marty Dickinson

President, HereNextYear, Inc.