Achieving First Page Listing on Search Engines

My new blog, Making Career Changes, achieved first page listing on both Google and Yahoo within a week for the key word "making career changes," one of the web's most often searched for terms.

My purpose in writing the Making Career Changes blog is several fold:

• Viral marketing for my coaching business -- Mapmaker Coaching,
• Providing a respository of information for people who attend the Job Seeker's ministry I work with,
• Processing what I am learning as I help people with career change and job searching.

It is also an experiment in determining if what I think I have learned about the power of blogging and podcasting in creating web presence is correct. I noticed that with my other two podcasts, Drawn2Jesus and Retire2Serve, that both got a lot of attention from the search engines. I attribute that to the fact that there are a number of web directories for podcasts, and that listings on podcast directories carry weight with the search engines because many not only provide a link, but reproduce the textual content of the podcast post -- the show notes. Therefore, in addition to traditional text entries in the Making Career Changes blog, I'm including occasional podcast entries, and have listed the podcasts on several of the major directories.

The experimental results seem to be a confirmation of my thesis. We'll have to see if that translates into success in viral marketing.