My on-page keyword optimization experiment

I recently decided to test some on-page optimization techniques to see how they affected my SERPs for an EXTREMELY competitive keyword (over 350,000 searches per month). A search for this particular keyword returns over a billion results (1.1 billion to be more exact). We'll call this keyword "foo mar shopping"

Before the experiment started, I was ranking about 600 in the world for "foo mar shopping". This number fluctuated between about 400 and 1000, but for the most part had settled into the 600 range. Not too bad for a competitive keyword that I hadn't optimized for at all.

Here's what I did on-page to optimize for the keyword. Most webmasters will recognize these techniques - they're strictly newbie level things.

• Added "foo mar shopping" to the front of my title tag.
• Rewrote my description META tag so that it included the keyword in it twice
• Also rewrote my keywords META tag so that it contained 4 variations of the keyword, including the actual keyword itself first in the list
• Added the keyword as the ALT tag on every image on the page
• Changed my style sheet so that H1 text showed up as only slightly larger than the other text, and bolded. I then added two separate column headers with the keyword using the H1 tag.
• I peppered my content with the keyword in a natural way. The keyword took up approximately 5% of my content.
• Where appropriate, I bolded, italicized, or underlined the keyword.
• All outbound links on the page had the "title" attribute added to the A tag with the title text being the exact keyword.
• I created an attractive bulleted list that was useful to the user and also included several variations of the keyword in the list items.
• On every page of my website, I linked back to the target page using the keyword as the anchor text.
  

So, I pulled some pretty uninventive tricks out of my bag. These are things that SEOers have been doing for years. My experiment was to see where my SERPs went for the keyword; I checked the results about every 3 days. Here are the results:

1. Day 3, first SERP check - ranking at about #500. Not significant because the normal SERP fluctuations had actually given me a higher ranking than this.
2. Day 7, 2nd SERP check - here's where the largest jump occurred. My Google SERP for the keyword jumped up to 110.
3. Day 9, 3rd SERP check - ranked #72 (yeah, broke that mystical "top 100" barrier"!)
   
4. Day 13, 4th SERP check - ranked #64
5. Day 15, 5th SERP check - ranked #74 (dropped here for some reason) {shrug}
6. Day 20, 6th SERP check - ranked #51
7. Day 25, 7th SERP check - ranked #49
8. Day 30, 8th SERP check - (this is today) ranked #39

The results themselves seem to suggest that correct on-page optimization can significantly help in raising the SERPs of an averagely ranked site. From #600 to #39 in one month is a pretty good result.

Just an FYI: this page only has a pagerank of 1, and I believe with some natural backlinking campaigns can be in the top ten for a keyword that is dominated by high pagerank websites.