What a Week! Search Engine Optimum First, Second, Third and Fourth!

Just a week ago, in "Establishing a baseline: What's in a name", I wrote about how this blog wasn't anywhere in the first few pages of Google's results, and how this wasn't surprising given that the blog was only a day old at the time. Well, what a difference a week makes: Not only does this blog show up on the first page in a search for "search engine optimum" now, but also it shows up in the very top position. And in the second position too!

Furthermore, on the 23rd, just 5 days ago, I registered the domain name "search-engine-optimum.com", and the next day,just 4 days ago, I posted a holding page to it. That page occupies positions 3 and 4 (it's essentially the same page, under two different names). So that's gold, silver, bronze and runner-up, all at once!

On top of that, Alexa.com now ranks this blog at position 9,797,390. Being 9,797,390th in the world might not be the most impressive thing ever, but it's better than millions of sites which have been around for longer. Speaking of which, search-engine-optimum.com, which was unranked a week ago, now ranks 15,342,486th. It also has 222 backlinks according to MajesticSEO, presumably a legacy of the previous ownership, though the last time that it was indexed by archive.org was in July 2007.

So, the target of getting this blog into the first page on Google for its name has been met, and comfortably exceeded, in just a week.

Is there any general lesson to be learned from this? I think there are a couple. First, I think it shows that Google attaches a lot of importance to the site name. If you want to rank highly for a certain phrase, it definitely helps a lot if your name is that phrase.

Second, it definitely helps if there isn't too much competition for the phrase you are trying to promote. Going for low-hanging fruit such as "search engine optimum" probably makes a lot more sense than going for "search engine optimization", at least to start with (besides, the latter is split between those who spell it with a "z" and those who spell it with an "s"). And if "search engine optimum" doesn't bring in enough hits, there's lots of other long-tail key phrases that we could add to it.

I suppose what I should do now is build up search-engine-optimum.com. I have a few ideas for what to put there, but it'll take a few days to put it all together. In the meantime - watch this space. When there's something to see there. I'll mention it here.