Since the topic of this post is SEO, it is appropriate that I start with a disclaimer.  I am not an SEO expert.  I’m not sure I would even qualify as an SEO amateur.  I mean, I’ve read some articles and tweaked some titles, headers, internal links, and meta tags, but for the most part, Wordpress, and all the awesome people on my blogrolls, do my SEO work for me.

So why this post then?  Well, the reason is that in the last week one of my sites broke into the top 10 for a competitive search phrase.  The site is Argentina’s Travel Guide, and it is ranking 10th in Google’s search results for both ”travel to argentina” and ”argentina travel” (at least for today it is).

When I first noticed the slight surge in traffic, my first reaction was “Yea for me!” and my second reaction was “Huh. I wonder why?"  The answer wasn’t hard to find, it goes back to a bit of luck and a bit of planning when I first launched the site.

Basically, it comes down to the site name and URL.  In my case, they’re almost the same.  The name of the site is Argentina’s Travel Guide, and the URL of the site is http://argentinastravel.com  That means that everyone linking to my site is bound to have both the words “argentina” and “travel” in the anchor text of the link, and as we all know, the text of a link carries weight with regards to what search phrases a site will rank for.  The lucky part was finding a short, sensical URL that included both the search words that I wanted to rank for, and (in my opinion) that was still a “.com”

Now, who wants to help me get into the top 3?