Good ole Google surprises me sometimes. I woke today to see this site now ranked #1 for “las vegas seo” and higher for a few other competitive keywords I had been building a core for a while ago.

Not sure what has really happened with Google. I’m assuming they are tinkering around with another panda-esque update. The reality is that ever since I took the Director of Marketing position over at Zexzoo/MyCitySocial I haven’t been doing much of anything as far as SEO is concerned with this site. So, these rankings could be temporary (though I was ranked #2 for weeks prior to today).

What’s likely the cause is the nature of the backlinks i’ve built to steffanhaeberle.com, how I have managed and maintained those backlinks and how I have automated the building of new backlinks to support both steffanhaeberle.com and the core backlinks built months ago. It’s all part of a multi-tiered on-site and off-site SEO strategy that I developed almost a year ago. It’s also why Zexzoo.com ranks so highly for super competitive keyword phrases like “daily deals” and why Rackwise.com continues to dominate the competition with keyword phrases like “data center management” and “data center software”. Not to mention the other sites I have that are self-supportive, automated and rank highly for other competitive keyword phrases that bring in substantial traffic and income to keep me in toys like my new 2012 Audi TT RS racecar.

What’s Your Secret to Successful SEO?

Well, the sauce is secret but it involves a highly optimized, keyword and content rich site combined with a core base of extremely authoritative back links from individual sites and from a network of linked and unlinked web 2.0 sites, new back links to the existing back links, regular news/press releases and an optimized social media campaign that is semi-automated. There you go!

I have no idea if steffanhaeberle.com will stay #1 for “las vegas seo” or if it will continue to climb for other keyword phrases I optimized and promoted it for (like “los angeles seo”) but I hope it will. It’s been fun to see this site continue to do well and rise in rankings though, especially since I haven’t been supporting this site as much as I probably should have.

EDIT (11/4/2011). Ah, looks like the company that used to be #1 is going through a name change because I am now seeing two websites in the top 10 for one company. The new (well, actually it was registered back in 2007) is now #1 so either they are going for the simpler domain name or someone left the company :). Either way, it really won’t matter. This website was always a way for me to showcase and it has always done exactly that. It was never intended to be a website for bringing in clients. In fact, I have turned down numerous (far too many to count) requests for client work since February. I am #2 in Google as of today for “las vegas seo” and that is awesome, especially considering the nature of this site, it’s age and the limited amount of resources and time that have been put into it these past few months. Still, I will continue to test out unique SEO methods using this site and another site that is also an SEO “test” website. Though, to be honest I don’t have a lot of hope for my competitors in Las Vegas and LA. 🙂

If you have any specific questions, feel free to shoot me an email.