How One Web Site Made It To The Top Of The SERP - A True Story

Where I live almost everyone I meet is either in the military or works for the government.  If they don't now they used to.  They retire pretty young, after 20 years of service, and then go start a new career and keep working while also collecting their pension.  If you don't live within an hour's drive of Washington DC this may seem strange.  But it's the way it is.

A few weeks ago I organized a lunch meeting for business owners to get together and discuss e-mail marketing.  It was there that I met Mo, a forty-ish JAG lawyer for the army who's just a few years shy of his early retirement.

Mo told me about a bunch of web sites he owns as a side business.  He's been building this side business for a few years, essentially creating his second-life-stage career for himself.

All of Mo's sites are doing well, but one of them is doing particularly well.  SECSportsFan.com is a membership site that contains loads of sports-related content.  Much of the content is generated by the members, although Mo himself created a lot of it in the beginning.  This in and of itself is not remarkable.  There are a gazillion sports-related web sites out there.

The remarkable thing about this web site is that it holds the #2 rank position on the SERPs for its related keywords.  Right behind the official SEC web site, which holds the #1 spot.

I asked Mo what his secret was.  Did he hire an SEO expert? Did he outsource to offshore VAs to build him hundreds of links and trackbacks and related blog comments?  Did he use social media or YouTube to promote the site?  No.  No.  No.  He didn't do any of these things.

What he did was to simply give the search engines what they want.  What they want is no big secret -- they want quality content that's relevant.  Sounds simple, right?

I dug a little deeper, and Mo told me about how he went about satisfying the search engines.  The story was so compelling that I asked him to let me interview him, so that I could share his "secrets" with you.  And he agreed.

I have the interview in audio format, and I'm currently editing it to get it down to a more manageable length of about 20 minutes.  I'll have it up for you next week, as well as another blog post to help you really nail down what you need to do to get great results like Mo got.

So stay tuned and check back next week.  You can use the RSS feature to get notified when the post is up.

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