One of my long term private client’s sites is currently hovering at the number slot 2 in Google UK for their most coveted phrase “party bags”.

As you can see, that’s out of more than 1 million ‘reported’ results (there obviously aren’t 1 million companies selling party bags, nothing like.)

Here’s how we did it.

1) Keyword Research to find out which phrase produced not only the most traffic but also the most sales. We quickly discovered the search phrase “party bags” accounts for more than 90% of their sales.

2) I tweaked the site’s home page and e-commerce template so it was optimised on the phrase party bags.

3) Create and maintain a link directory (on the site), which now contains a fairly long list of links to closely relevant sites. (And got those same sites to link back to this site.)

4) My client constantly keeps updating the site so it’s fresh. This is not done for the search engine’s benefit, it’s done for the customers so they have more choice.

The result of those 4 activities are an (almost) pole position for the best phrase on Google. And the result is highly targeted and pre-qualified (ready to buy) traffic to my client’s site.

OK, now considering I did all of the first 3 items single handedly, how long do you reckon my involvement was? 12 months, or more?

No, about 8 hours in all.

Keyword research was performed in Google Adwords. After the initial setup of opening an account, writing adverts and pasting in keywords and installing conversion tracking on the ecommerce site — it was more or left to it’s own devices.

It soon became very obvious which was the most profitable phrase.

Then last March I spent about 30 minutes optimising the site for that number one phrase. About another half an hour was spent implementing a system that automatically finds link partners. And the remaining 2 hours was spent adding link partners to the directory and checking they had linked back.

All of this is explained in my book – the Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy. That’s the same book I recommend web site owners don’t put all their money into search engine optimisation (SEO) services. Does that sound like a dichotomy? It’s all explained in the book.

So here I would normally recommend you get my book, but as of about 5 minutes ago I took it off the market. Why?

No, I’m not sadistic! Just that the new paperback version of my book will be out in the next few months. It’s been updated with a lot of new stuff, including all my blogging experiences and results over the last 12 months, so no point in me continuing to sell the old version.

If you’re subscribed to this blog, you’ll be getting a present soon — a totally free copy of the ebook (PDF) version of the book, sometime in the next month. (My private email address clients will be getting a preview of the book in the next few weeks.)

In a nutshell, if you’re not subscribed to this blog then you’ll miss out!

Finally, the paperback version, will be announced here (on this blog) as a 24 hour special with 65% discount for 24 hours, sometime in the next 2 months.

-Ed.