Well I’ll be.

Decided on a lark to include as a side page a search term Longtail Pro hipped me to – “weekend getaways from NYC.” 3600 local exact match searches per month is nothing to sneeze at. $2.51 average cost per click isn’t mind blowing (and only about a sixth the avg cpc of the keyword I’ve selected for Pat Flynn’s niche site duel 2.0), but consider the rationale for my travel site in the first place:

I want to travel, and launched a blog as a way to make a good deal of my travel Business Travel, and as a “stakes raiser” to keep me from chickening out of going on trips.

By the way, if you have no idea what any of the above jargon means, read this, and then this.

Anyway, a rank of 64 for my search term doesn’t seem that impressive, until you consider that I haven’t done one iota of SEO on this site. Yes, I’ve linked from this blog to the site, and almost totally random received a rank from a higher ranked (and very cool looking) style blog.

And I’m aware that it may be a lark. Sites can sometimes do a dizzying ride up and down the rankings known as the “google dance.” So no illusions.

Still, this illuminates two things-

1) They keyword for which I’m ranking was not the keyword upon which I launched the site. That keyword was “getaways for couples.” (At the time I was using Market Samurai to do keyword research, and while it’s a beautiful piece of machinery, it doesn’t have the same idiot-proof simplicity that Longtail Pro does.) This means you can indeed rank for multiple keywords within a single site, and that an exact match url is not necessary. What that means is I should go buck-wild trying to find keywords semantically related to my niche and write articles about them. Sounds like another night in…

2) Tim Ferriss’ adage that early successes is essential to build momentum and Steven Pressfield’s appeal to the professional to seek real world feedback both proved prescient. I was so busy building content I hadn’t come up “for air” to check my ranking. Doing that, while I don’t recommend doing it too much (see also: “resistance”, in Pressfield’s book), it sure helped rekindle my motivation.

Again, don’t want to make too much about this, because the site is so young, but it’s encouraging. It also segues perfectly into my post breaking down Spencer Haws’ SEO methodologies and how I’m planning to apply them to my site. (Since I haven’t done any SEO yet, I want to be extra careful not to get “sandboxed”, or penalized by Google for sketchy link-building tactics.)

Look for the Spencer post later this week.