Learning How to Milk Google

I’m a total Apple fanboy. I won’t try to deny it, and I’m sure I’ll do a post someday about my Apple fanboy lifestyle. Just sitting here at my desk, I have in my view an iMac, iPhone, iPod Video, and Airport Extreme router. Geeky, remember?

Anyway, I like to watch the 2-3 Apple keynotes a year like a movie. I avoid all spoilers throughout the day and then rush home to watch it. I even have my wife pull up the video for me and minimize all other browser windows so I won’t accidentally see anything. Certain that there were others like me out in the world, I wrote a blog post early Tuesday morning (the day of the keynote) that provided a link to a particular page on macrumors.com. This page provides a spoiler-free link to the Apple keynote video when it is released, usually around dinnertime the day of the keynote. After I got home and watched the keynote with my own virgin eyes, I updated my post and provided the direct link to the movie file on Apple’s servers.

What surprised me, however, was when I started looking at my site traffic for Tuesday and Wednesday. Apparently, my week-old blog was getting the #1 and #2 search result on Google for several different search strings. I couldn’t believe it! I’ve done ZERO site marketing except announcing it to my Twitter and Facebook friends and other family members. However, my site somehow had enough “Google Juice” to rank me #1. In fact, as I type this post Wednesday evening, I’m still #1 on several different searches. See:

What I found interesting is that I avoided using “iPod” in the blog post title. Instead, I used the most specific, relevant information: “Apple,” the name of the event, the date, and the term “spoiler free.” And that shot me up to the top of the search results. This happened within hours of my original post, too. While testing the search results, I inserted the word “iPod” into the search string and my site was nowhere to be found in the search results. My assumption is that by staying away from the most common term, “iPod,” and instead using other, perhaps lesser-searched terms, I avoided the glut of other “iPod” search results and instead hit my target audience: Apple fanboys who wanted a spoiler-free link to the keynote.

This may seem like a lot about nothing, but I’m beginning to find it fascinating. It’s awesome to realize that within a week of starting one in a billion new blogs, an unknown geek managed to own the top spot on some Google searches. It makes me more aware of how to phrase my post titles, and more determined to craft some more winners in the near future.

Not a bad first week, methinks.

Minor Milestone: 1,000 Page Views in a Week!

This is no big deal to you, but pretty interesting to me. I launched this site last Tuesday, and just a few minutes ago, I had my 1,000th page view. That’s a lot more traffic than I expected for this site (especially in the first week).

1000!

Part of this was because of Google, which I’ll write about tonight or tomorrow. I’m learning some interesting things about how Google works. Good times.

Anyway, big thanks to you, #1,000… whoever you were.