My 15 Day Old Blog Ranked In The First Page of Google Search – Here’s How

Image By: Kristof Ramon
Every new blogger dreams of the good days when their site will hit the first page of Google search, and so did I. I did some research and figured, if I continued producing fresh, engaging content, I’d get a taste of first page glory pretty soon. But I was pleasantly surprised by how soon it turned out to be.

Just about 15 days after I Posted my first article, one of my posts started showing up in the first page of Google search. When I noticed, I decided to track the things I did to make this happen so I could do it again, and help others achieve the same results.

How My Post Ranked So Quickly

Here are the things I did, and the things you should do if you want your post to rank well in search.

1. Choose a highly searched keyword using Google trends: If you aim to rank in search, keyword research is an absolute yes. There are quite a few good tools that can help you know which keyword you should aim for. However, if you simply want to know which keywords a lot of people are typing into search, Google trends is the tool for you. Since my blog also covers help topics for freelancers, I decided to search for freelance related keywords that were highly searched. Using trends, I found out that the keyword “Upwork Profile Overview Sample” got a ton of search traffic. When I tried to search Google for relevant articles, I found very few, which made this a highly searched keyword with low competition. Wonderful!

2. Make the keyword the title of the blog post: Yes I went ahead and named the article “Upwork Profile Overview Sample.” This means Google hardly had a choice but to show my post in search results, and in a good position too. It may not always make sense to use exact keywords in your title, but whenever it does, you should.

3. Share the article in Google plus: I had read articles claiming that this works for SEO, but never thought too much of it. After posting the sample overview blog however, I decided to share it through my personal Google plus profile, and shortly thereafter, the post saw the first page of search. Google considers social activity when indexing posts, but none so much as their own Google plus. So if you have not started sharing your content on this social network, you are missing out.

4. Use a SEO plugin: SEO plugins help you ensure each post or page you publish is search engine optimized. One of the best SEO plugins for WordPress is Yoast SEO, and this was the plugin I chose for my blog. I had it installed and functioning before I pubished my first post.

5. Ensure your site is well coded: Since my blog was just about 15 days old, this part comes into play. If you use a crappy theme for your WordPress blog, Google spider will likely find so many errors, it will be sad-faced each time it remembers it has to crawl your blog. Errors ruin SEO.

(Check out this post to see some of the best free WordPress themes)

Before creating this blog, I took the time to search for, and test theme code structures before I settled on one. In setting up various parts of the blog (permalink for example), I also ensured the best SEO practices were followed. I’ve been blogging for a while now, but I know I’m not yet as experienced as the blogessionals who had been doing this for many years, so when they have a solid opinion about best practices, I follow, and it works.

How Can You Use This Information?

When you are new to blogging, the challenges are many. Before launching your blog, you may have looked at successful bloggers who get a ton of traffic and thought to yourself; I’m going to make my blog this popular pretty soon. But pretty soon, you find out it doesn’t quite work that way.

Blogging is hard work. It takes time and effort to come up with articles, so it’s easy to be discouraged if your effort intensive and wonderfully written articles don’t get loaded into anyone’s browser. However, your site will get all the traffic you need if you take time to learn how the pros make it happen.

Of course getting a few spots in the first page of Google search is a great start, so use the tips that worked for me, and thank me later.

If there some other tips you believe can make a post rank high, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Happy Blogging!