Search engine optimization interests me, and I like to think that I do my homework when it comes to creating a page that that Google will look upon favorably.
For a little over a month now, a page on this site has had the top ranking on Google for the search terms “virtualbank referral”. Officially, according to the statistics at Google Sitemaps, my page at http://www.ardamis.com/virtualbank/ has been the #1 result for these terms, as averaged over the last three weeks.
As they say in investing, past performance is not an indicator of future results. And honestly, I rather doubt that I could replicate this feat (although I’m certainly going to keep trying). However, I do intent to maintain at least a top ten ranking for these particular search terms until it is no longer profitable to do so.
As of March 26, 2006, the above page has a Page Rank of 3. I’m not satisfied with that, but then again, what more would I really gain by having a Page Rank of 5+, besides bleeding a fraction of it through a few off-site links.
Achieving top ranking didn’t come overnight, but as evidenced in a rather bewildered and frustrated blog post dated October 27, 2005, it took less than six months for this page to go from non-indexed to the #1 result. (Note that I have changed the link in that post to point to another page on this site, as part of an experiment with a separate page.)
I’m currently considering the feasibility of selling this ranking, by way of a 301 redirect.
Update: I’ve rearranged the site, so that the page referred to in this post is now part of another website entirely. It can be found at: http://www.onlinebankdeals.com/virtualbankreferral/.
