This article was published on September 20, 2009

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


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

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.

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