Search Clarity

How about them apples? (Warning: some serious navel gazing going on here. But all in the fun of watching a new site rank.)

As little authority as this domain (searchclarity.com) currently has, last night’s blog post Will it Rank? Floating a new site for “SEO for Book Publishers” has floated up to the third domain listed (fifth URL) (my Google preferences are set to view 100 listings, so frequently I’ll see an expanded list with clustered URLs from the same domain more frequently than when the preferences are set to only 10 results.)

And that was quick; only 15 hours later:

Remember, the goal here isn’t to rank SearchClarity.com, but rather to float what I’m going to refer to as the official SEO for Book Publishers domain up to the top spot for it’s namesake “branded” query. The supposition is that by using a keyword-link magnet domain (a domain that will influence how the linkerati will link to a URL), we’ll have the best shot possible at outranking any other URL that comes along for the query seo for book publishers. Will a keyword-link magnet domain alone make the difference? Over the long term, most likely not; it’ll need the support of the collective intelligence that Google harnesses to determine relevancy. And today, more than anything, that means high quality links.

But the fact that SearchClarity.com had a post that showed up so quickly, and so high in the results for this term, underscores a few realities about this particular SERP, perhaps most notably that there are just not that many indexed pages that contain this exact text string. In fact, there are approximately 28 known URLs that Google reports here:

Compare that to a non-exact match for the same phrase, without the use of quotation marks, and you get an exponentially larger number: 140,000 document

The more specific a query, the fewer documents that Google will find relevant, and typically, that translates into less competition. So if “all other things” were equal, then this formula should bear out:

fewer documents = fewer competitors = easier to get ranked

However, all things are never equal, are they? What if there are 30 URLs that have been given far more authority to rank than any other URL in the index for those terms? That would be harder to break into. Try getting ranked for “buy viagra”. Not impossible, but that’s, well… harder. And that leads to another corresponding formula:

more trusted authority documents = more competition = harder to get ranked = expensive and time consuming

Following this line of thought, getting ranked for the exact match phrase “seo for book publishers” should be a snap compared to the broad match version of the same phrase. But both will be considerably easier to rank for than what is arguably a branded query such as “seo book”, or a category phrase such as “book publishers”. While a rank for either of these might be a feather in our cap, that’s hardly our goal. We just want to get a new domain ranked for the name of it’s namesake term, which is also the same name as the TOC Tutorial session, and the companion DVD Tutorial to be released this month: SEO for Book Publishers.

And now, with one more blog post added to the arsenal, we have added another relevant blog post for our target query, complete with a couple of links. And the game continues…

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