Extreme SEO Makeover: What Does It Mean?

Well, the Extreme SEO Makeover seminar is finally published in blog form. So after all that, what does it actually mean? Is it worth doing any of this stuff? To answer that, let me take you back to end of 2006 and a conversation with a fellow entrepreneur about his website, and see for yourself how powerful these techniques can be.

SEO Challenge

Fred, a fellow entrepreneur in the Tech Fort Worth business incubator, was talking to us over Christmas break about his website not pulling in as many customers as he wanted. We tried explaining about SEO and how his site wasn’t well optimized, and how we could do better etc. Well, the conversation went back and forth and finally Fred challenged us to back up our SEO claims. “Put together a reseller site for yourselves,” he said, “and beat my ranking for my own keywords.” The challenge was on!

His web guy was using an open-source e-commerce package, one that isn’t really well optimized for SEO purposes. Still, he had the advantage of a four year old domain with lots of backlinks, and we didn’t have anything – no domain, no content, no anything. All we had was Fred’s keyword phrase that we had to beat: “egrips ad specialty item“.

Except, we had the SEO know-how…

Building the Site

Well, as I’ve outlined in the Extreme SEO Makeover, we started with some good old-fashioned keyword research to see what other keywords in addition to Fred’s we needed to include. Then, an hour playing with domain name variations ended with getting a domain name registered. We then worked on the architecture and layout of the site, settling on a layout we could all live with.

Optimized content and visuals were next added, along with an auto-generated quote function. Within a week of starting the project, we had a complete site of ten or so pages published on the web and ready to rock and roll.

Meeting the Challenge

With the site built and fully optimized (as described in the Extreme SEO Makeover series), we next turned our attention to off-page optimization — that is, link building. We wanted to prove how powerful our on-page optimization techniques were, so we did minimal link building – maybe a half dozen links placed to mainly let the search engines know we existed. The results?

We beat Fred’s site for his keywords within 22 days of accepting his challenge.

Yes, that’s right. We went from no domain/website to #1 on Google in 22 days, by following the techniques I discussed in this blog series. And you know what? Since Fred’s site has such a poorly optimized open source framework, we remained ahead of him for his keyword phrase for over two years, and passed him on variations of that keyword too.

Epilogue

Now, Fred’s keywords were not terribly competitive, but still it showed that good on-page optimization and minimal links can beat poor on-page optimization and lots of links. Just imagine how powerful a good Extreme SEO Makeover paired with a good link building campaign could be?

Extreme SEO Makeover blog series

• Seminar Feedback
• Introduction to Extreme SEO Makeover
• Identify your Keywords
• Keyword Research
• Measuring your Status
• Aligning Keywords and Pages
• Optimizing Pages
• Trust but Verify
• Conclusions