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Back in January I got serious about improving WhySpam.Me’s search engine ranking. I started religiously checking Hacker News and paying specific attention to search engine optimization (SEO) articles. Since then i’ve gone from page rank (PR) zero to four in a little under four months, you can see for yourself using prchecker or rapidSiteCheck. This is the story of how I did it:

January -

I started out by focusing on on-site improvement, I re-formatted all of my URL’s to be human readable and relevant. I added unique keyword and description meta tags for all my pages. I used google’s webmaster’s tools to get insight on whether or not I appeared to have duplicate meta tags. I used wordtracker.com’s free tools to help me find some good keywords to target; though never give them your real email address, they will spam the mess out of you. I also used google analytics to track my site traffic and see where users were coming from.

Since there are other web pages in my market I reviewed their keywords and meta information, and used that information to make my own tags better. I started this blog in an effort to drive some fresh content. It is  hosted under blog.whyspam.me because a subdomain’s PR goes towards the main site.

Result: Page Rank jumped from 0 to 1

February -

On site optimizations can only take you so far, at the end of the day you need to have inbound links. So I started to work on getting more links. I installed the amazing  SearchStatus toolbar for Firefox. It gives you a sixth sense on the web by automatically pulling Page Rank for the website you’re on. I started to promote WhySpam.Me through link building. I started off by checking the competition using a backlink tracer. I was able to see all of the directories they were a part of and submit my site. I also promoted the site through on ThinkBohemian (my personal blog), facebook and twitter.

A note on comment spam: people don’t like it, so don’t do it unless you you’re actually adding to the conversation. Flag yourself as a developer to avoid raising suspicions, plus this opens the door for people to give you direct feedback on your website.

Result: Page Rank creeped from 1 to 2

March –

I continued hunting for directories to submit my site to. I also began soliciting other websites and blogs to do writeups on my site. I did this at first by directly asking for them to feature WhySpam.Me.  When that didn’t work i tried to solicit for feedback on my app hoping they would like it and do a write up. This got a better reception, but didn’t produce results.

I got the most links by finding out-of-date articles and suggesting that “In the interest of providing up to date, accurate information to your readers.” that they add my service, and remove a broken link. I was able to get one review and a few links by doing this, but I quickly learned that link building was hard work and my hours of hard work were slowly producing results at best. This method showed I cared about their users and was an actual visitor to their website. The more I emailed editors the better I got at it.

I just kept in mind that everyone loves their own name, and wants their life to be easier, so pitch I pitched my article to them accordingly. I kept a document of all my pitches, so I could see how I changed over time and to have different pitches for different markets. Even if your app is perfect, no one will care unless you can sell them on it.

During March, i was featured in killerstartups.com, i saw a big spike in traffic, and resulted in a lot of ‘me too’ articles from other websites in other languages. This translated into not just a spike but an elevated number of users

I used google Analytics to see where my inbound traffic came from, and to see if you could improve on any of the sources. A few of the smaller blogs, i commented on my own articles and sent them emails thanking them for the review, making contacts in this way would help out later.

Result: Page Rank kept marching from 2 to 3

April -

I noticed through google webmaster that some of the user generated website reviews were showing up in long tail searches, so i added a few extra keywords to those pages, and was able to double the number of page impressions for the website reviews. I spent less time working on direct link building and more time on my application. As a fun side project I developed and released ShadyEmail.com which is using WhySpam.Me as a backend. Before I released the site, I emailed everyone who had featured the main WhySpam.Me application on their web page, and as a result a majority of them covered the ShadyEmail release. Since shadyemail.com redirects to http://whyspam.me/shadyemail all inbound links count towards the main page rank. The extra links on launch day were enough to bump up the site to PR 4.

Result: Page Rank sky-rocketed from 3 to 4

Onwards

I’m not done with SEO by a long shot, i’ve still got more articles to submit, more directories to find, more bloggers to solicit, a press release to write and as always, i’m adding new features and improving the site’s core functionality. It only took me 4 months to get my first PR4 site to its current rank, so no one should feel like SEO is impossible.

Do your homework, check out the beginners guide to seo but most importantly go out there and try things for yourself. Remember building page rank takes time, but it can be done.

Update - You most likely will not see your page rank go up every time, as a commenter on HackerNews has been kind enough to point out. I did watch my page rank go from zero to four over the course of four months, but actually never saw it go from zero to one, or from one to two. Though based on jumps in search position, and interpolation I considered this a fair statement to make.

Richard Schneeman -@ThinkBohemian