The Next Web

How I got to the first page of Google thanks to ONE bookmarklet

By Zee
September 20, 2009
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Picture 3I’ve got to be honest, I hated writing the title to this post, it reminded me (and still does) of the many ghastly SEO blogs, sites and ebooks, each with their own disastrous approaches to supposedly helping you get to the top of Google. If you know me and/or read this site, you should hopefully by now realise I’m not a bullshitter and what I’m about to explain genuinely does work (sigh…again, this sounds like an informercial but I promise, I’m not selling a thing).

Anyway, here we go…

My personal site and blog has become a very important aspect of my online life. If I’m completely honest, it started with Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress founder) when he claimed to be the most “important” Matt in the world because he ranked number one in Google for the search term “Matt”. That’s all changed now since “Where the hell is Matt” popped onto the scene, but nevertheless the ego inside me thought, “I must be the most important Zee in the world, must get to the top of Google…”

I launched my person site not 6 months ago, and have since reached the top 5 Google search results for “Zee” (depending on where you’re based)…So I’m getting there.

How?

The most significant tool, Posterous.

Picture 5Posterous is a web application we’ve mentioned a number of times, and it’s no secret we’re big fans of the service, and with good reason. Posterous is essentially a blogging platform lets you post blog posts via email rather than being forced to use an online editor. The service also lets you autopost your blog posts through to other services like YouTube, Twitter, Friendfeed etc.

One invaluable useful tool that Posterous provides is their bookmarklet. A way to browse the web and in a matter of seconds post from your Posterous blog and then autopost to Flickr, Twitter and more.

The most significant piece of help Posterous provides is their autoposting to wordpress blogs.

It’s no secret that with Wordpress, the right theme, the right plugins and with the right content you can nail SEO and gain some pretty remarkable search engine rankings fast.

What You Need

On that basis, to do what the title says, you are going to need to have a:

  1. Wordpress blog (download) with with a relevant URL (I wanted to get high up the rankings for ‘Zee’, I manged to get zee.me)
  2. Well optimized Wordpress theme
  3. SEO plugins
  4. The right content (no links here, that is down to you.)

You will also need:

  1. A Posterous account/blog set up to post to Wordpress (takes no more than 3-5 minutes)
  2. The Posterous bookmarklet (drag it to your toolbar)

Finally, once you’ve got your Wordpress blog up and running, ensure you have the Wordpress to Ping.fm plugin up and running. Set it up to autopost to all your main social media profiles (note: you make this work better by NOT using Ping.fm, see the improvements section at the bottom of this post)

How It Works

Essentially, the way it works, browse the web, find stuff you enjoy and think is shareable/retweetable/diggable/enjoyable and use the Posterous bookmarklet to post it to your Posterous blog which should then in turn autopost what you just found to your own blog.

Once that’s done, using the Wordpress to Ping.fm plugin, all your social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook etc..) should have received the tweet/post/share with a link back to your blog.

Why this Works

Quite simply, it’s no secret that one of the greatest determinants of your Google ranking are the number of links back to your site. If you’re sharing *quality* content onto your site, you should receive retweets, you should have other sites linking back to you and again, with the right content, you’ll see your site rise up the rankings and fast.

Ways to improve
(if you’re willing to put in a little more time, this is worth it)

  1. Don’t use the Ping.fm wordpress plugin, instead, use specific Wordpress plugins for each specific social networks. For example, Twitter has plenty of plugins that allow you to immediately tweet once you’ve posted. Friendfeed has it’s SUP plugin that immediately imports a blog post into Friendfeed immediately after its published.
  2. Install the Media RSS plugin for Wordpress. For sites like Friendfeed, you’ll see images actually appear in the stream rather than just links back.
  3. Post frequently.

  • We really enjoyed reading this post. It would be interesting to see how this concept works if you are not using wordpress as your primary blogging platform. Has anyone tested this approach with Blogger yet. We would like to hear about your experiences.
  • The only problem with using Posterous to post directly into your WordPress blog is you still have to go back into the blog if you want to customise the post's title tags, meta info, excerpts and so on.
    If you care about those things.
  • Quality over quantity? Maybe it's more to
    do with the fact that your posts are well written and informative?
  • Cool post Zee. I don't doubt that you are the #1 most important Zee in the world, but you might have a hard time hustling zee.me to the #1 spot. I doubt if you will be changing your short and catchy domain zee.me but it is worth noting that a top level domain helps with seo, which is why I recently made the switch for my personal Blog from Garin.me to Gar1n.com and switched my Twitter name to @Gar1n. With the quantity and quality of your posts I don't doubt that you'll make it to #1, so I'll see you at the top!
  • I searched for "Zee" and zee.me is not in the first page of Google results. Your twitter page and friendfeed profile are however within the first page spots.
  • It is in the US and UK for definite Mohan. I'm not lying, you think i'd risk my reputation by writing a post based on bullshit?
  • Great post. Tempted to try it out, but I also don't get you top of the results. Actually you were top of page 2. (UK search).

    Are you sure this works? or has google just flagged you as spam?

    You know that Google puts at the top of YOUR search results the sites you have visited before. So maybe you get zee.me on page one only because Google knows you visit that page regularly.
  • What about the duplicate content issue Zee? I use Posterous an the bookmarklet and have been asked a couple of times how others' content got into my site.
  • When I have found a really interesting article i want to share on my blog, and have used Posterous to copy the entire thing. I will use this plugin to redirect the post to the original site: http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/page-links-to/
  • It raises the question though, with what purpose would people search for zee? Is that a common search phrase for someone wanting to find the information on next web?
  • I personally believe with the right URL and relevant quality content, this would still work.

    The big benefit with Posterous (email and bookmarklet) is being able to post/share hand picked relevant quality content with links back to the original source when necessary...very very fast.
  • Interesting reading, as always. I have a serious and literal question, related to Chase's asking if it would be likely that people search for zee: Is being at the top of Google really the big objective it once was? Certainly for sales sites where people look for "lounge chair" or "motorola CLIQ" it is.
    Shouldn't one work hardest at actual value in posts and getting trust agents to post links? Google is only as good as the search terms. What if you're looking for something only a human can classify? Something like "What is the most highly thought of xyz by people who should know about xyz?" That question could only be credibly answered by someone believed to have inside or expert knowledge about xyz.
  • Zee-

    Thanks for putting this together. One point of clarification, if you please. In your "Ways to improve" section, are you removing the Ping.fm plugin simply so that you don't post duplicate links out on all the feeds? Or is there another reason?

    Thanks,
    Travis
  • Two reasons why I suggest removing Ping.fm:
    1) Is because I find it rather unreliable
    2) For sites like Friendfeed, I'd like to be able to import the image from the post - Ping.fm doesn't support that.
  • I have a personal blog as well and was excited to read this article. I used it for 30 min until I realized it was useless. In Wordpress, there is no options for tags or categories which really ruins the point of the blog. I went ahead and stuck with the 'Press this' feature in wordpress which does the same thing yet allows for categories and tags. But interesting read! Thanks
  • The Posterous bookmarklet does support categories, but not tags. If you want to add a post to a particular category, then add this to the Posterous post title ((tag: categoryname)). More instructions here:
  • How do you know that bookmarklet got you up to the top five? What about the fact that "zee" is in the url and on-page optimization? I understand the system, just unclear why you pin your rankings to it.
  • Great post. I'm going to fiddle with this for my business stuff. For the more casual user who wants to post quickly and share with smaller groups via Facebook, Twitter, etc... here's more info on pros and cons of Posterous, Soup.io, ShareIn and FriendFeed - http://bit.ly/2AkvAs
  • TOMARTOMARTINI
    Zee:a really big thank you .
  • I am currently testing the use twitter lists as a way of making relevant urls and rising to the top of search engine results (now that Google is heavily indexing twitter). I have managed to get to the first position for "most followed twitter uk" by creating a list of the most followed in the UK. The next step was to get ranked for the term "most followed on twitter", so I have created a list that follows all the most followed people worldwide and I predict that through this I will achieve a top result for that common search phrase.
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