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What does it take to get to the number one ranked position at Bing? That is what I asked fellow Tennessean Greg Traver.
Based in Memphis, Traver's Organic Gardening blog recently made the number one search result at Bing for blogs relating to organic gardening, which is exactly how I found him to begin with. Starting at the beginning of March 2011, Traver's blog earned the coveted number one position. The number two position belonged to none other than Organic Gardening. com part of the Rodale corporate publishing companies. I did a search for Traver and contacted him to see if he wouldn't mind talking about his blog and more specifically how he did it. Here is part of that conversation. What did you do to knock the corporate giant Rodale out of the number one. After all they have an entire staff working at their site while you are writing on a netbook in between gardening, writing and parenting. (laughing) "I don't have a clue! Honestly, I can't point to any one thing that I did as being the magic bullet. First, it is just basic SEO techniques that I have picked up along the way. It's kind of like asking what instrument makes the orchestra. There are just so many things you have to juggle and keep focused on. If you look at the way the organic gardening blog is listed in the search engine results you will see 90 percent of what I know about SEO right there. But you have to look close and be observant." Initially I thought that the organic gardening niche would be very tiny and blogs even less. I was surprised to find that after I entered my search for organic gardening blogs on Bing I got 14,200,000 results. That's a pretty good sized niche. But as I was writing this interview I checked one day and found that the blog had dropped to number eleven in the search results. I pondered it for a couple days and the third day that I searched, there it was at number one again. I asked Traver what the reason for that was. "Believe me, I have thought about that a lot over the past few months. When I fist saw that the blog had hit number one it was a very euphoric moment. It was a bit depressing to see it slip down after a week. The best explanation that I can come up with is that some one these larger sites get spidered quite often while our site only gets spidered once a month. It seems that at the beginning of the month when we get all our new content spidered it jumps right back to number one. The spike in traffic is great thing too" While documenting Travers top ranking these last three months I have read a lot of his content and it is apparent after a simple search that he has been published in some very highly ranked websites both far and wide. You have been writing professionally for over four years now, what would you say are that the top three things that have had the biggest impact for your organic gardening blog? "Adding more photos has been a huge help. They add color and texture and a whole new dimension. When you are writing about tomato horn worms nothing gets the point across like a color close up." Where do you get the photos for your blog? "All the graphics that I use on the blog are from my own photography. Let's talk about links for a bit. There is a lot of information floating around on the internet about links, are they really that important to a blogs overall success? "Absolutely. Great content only takes you so far. But hopefully in the process, it leads you to someone who has a top rated website and gets a lot of traffic, who likes your work and decides they are willing to grant you a link. Those are the best. Having a high traffic website link to your site is a great boost to your credibility and your page ranking. The search engines see that they put in a new link and make the connection with your website and take it as an endorsement of your work. Then the search engines raise you up a little more" Jack Bosch 2011
To see Traver's number one ranked blog for yourself visit Organic Gardening Blog.
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