Fun With SEO - Ranking for Waxed Meat

I was kind of in an odd mood this week and I thought it would be a fun experiment to try to rank for an odd keyword. I'm pretty much an seo n00b, so I thought this experiment would help me bit to find out what works when trying to rank for a keyword. Well, I'd had the tagline "DEVTRENCH is not Waxed Meat" going around and around in my head for about a week, and decided to go with Waxed Meat for my keyword.

At this point you might be wondering what in the hell is waxed meat. Honestly, I didn't know before doing this, and I have no clue where or why that phrase popped into my head. I'm just going to decide it was fate. If you want to know click here (warning this is kind of gross).

After setting my sites on my odd keyword, I did a Google search and was quite surprised that Google thinks there are 2,290,000 web pages about waxed meat. However the Overture Keyword tool reports that, surprise, surprise, no one searches for it. So we have a lot of indexed pages, and no competition, perfect for my experiment.

To be begin the experiment I used Shoemoney's serps tool to see if I was in the top 100 already, which I wasn't (no surprise there). Then I added the bold link in the footer of the page: NO WAXED MEAT. Then I added a link back to my site in my Digital Point forums with the text: DEVTRENCH is not WAXED MEAT.

That's all I did, and in 2 days I was listed 7th in Google and 4th in MSN. Today, it has been 5 days and I'm 4th in Google and 2nd in MSN (yahoo and altavista apparently don't like me). So, my experiment shows that this was apparently pretty easy to do :)

EDIT: I've made it to #2 so far!

So is there any practical application to this? Sure there is, a lot actually. If you want to build your search engine traffic, then one strategy would be to rank well for as many low competition keywords as you can. You're probably not going to rank very high for the big keywords in your niche for a while, so why not knock of all of the smaller ones first? It's good to build a list of low competition keywords and find out where you rank on them. A good place to start is the Google Analytics keyword section, or another web statistics program like Awstats. That will tell you what people are already searching for to get to your blog. Once you get your keyword list, the use Shoemoney's serps tool to find where you are at. You should then target any keywords that you rank in the top 100 and get those up to the first page. Once you do that, you might be surprised to find out that you rank somewhere in the top 100 for that keyword you've been dreaming of.