FINALLY!!! Beat About.com!

16 months of fairly aggressive linking, and I have finally snagged the #1 spot from About.com for the keyword "orthopedics"..

Can't count how many times I've posted on this site for advice and I'd always be frustrated by the response "build links".. Sadly, that's about the only thing worth spending SEO hours on these days

Maintaining will be just as hard as attaining. Thanks all.

Good job!

I'd like to hear what your technique is for link building.

Because emailing and asking sure doesn't work well

Ed

I disagree - if you're VERY niche (and let's be honest, some of us are extremely niche) there aren't that many people who will want to voluntarily link to you.

ie: super small electronic blue widge accessories

UNLESS you spend lots of time providing forumula, data and what not on how these things work, etc.

A thought is a blog about your "upper level general niche" and then link to your site through that.

If you are very niche you may have a nice "chunk" of the ecommerce, but it's unlikely that people will be beating down the door to link to you.

Watch industry related forums for questions - supply answers with links to your site (follow the TOS of course).

You may be able to put VERY loosely related content - I use converters (java script), all sorts of data, the history of etc.

Congrats! Beating about and/or wikipedia is not easy ;)

Congratulations! I bet you are feeling great about this. They are hard to beat.

ha ha... I see you have "1st on the web!"

I am lucky to be above them for the root term in my area. It took several hundred .edu links.

Getting links is much harder for a web site that just sells stuff.

Whenever I contact a webmaster with the intent to get a link, I NEVER ask for it in my first contact. Your response rate will be exponentially higher. After an email or two, I ask if they'd mind linking, all while playing dumb to SEO. You will get much better results than " Hey I noticed you have a site about x, would you please consider linking to my site about x because your visitors will like it I think"

Bad example below, but you'll get the idea:

1st email "Hey so and so, I love your site. Since you seem to be running a great site yourself, would you mind taking a peak at mine and letting me know what you think. I'd really appreciate any feedback or suggestions"

2nd email "Thanks alot for the feedback. I worked so hard to build my site and no one seems to be coming to it, so I am trying to find ways to improve it and get people to come"

3rd email "Good ideas.. Speaking of which, would you happen to mind linking to me. I'd be happy to link back"

Congratulations ! I got a few keywords that beat Wiki .. but never was able to beat about.com.

wow amazing! congrats! But I think you should improve your site because it is not orthopedic at all! (for a webdesigner =D )

Anyway did you find out image map linking is better for SEO? , This website is a real case for an experimentation =D

That's probably because you don't have a business model that lends itself to getting strong authoritative links. I have a client who almost outranks Microsoft for Online Microsoft Certification and as for About.com...Wikipedia...we scoff at them! This post that a lot of people missed gives the details of our success.

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/theory-why-google-serps-so-stable-183811.html

Note: MaximumTadpole...I meant SELLING SEO services in my comment.

Congrats!

I just beat about.com as well, but i'm still looking up at Wikipedia. It's a crying shame that it takes so much effort to beat about.com when (at least in my case) their page is so bad, and old. Anyway, congrats! Keep kicking butt!

Hmmm that is interesting. I wonder if something is changing. It would be great if google stopped giving all these big of limited relevance sites such good rankings.

well its a good news for you!
Did you just build link or you also did some on page optimization?

I bet it's 99% off-page [links] and 1% on-page

Congrats Tadpole I checked your site and found that you have some solid edu and org sites linking to it.

Great job buddy..keep it up!!

wow great job...
tremendously inspiring for others...

Image map linking is NOT better for SEO. Unfortunately, I had little budget and web design changes were out of the question.