Timely Story Gets On Google’s First Page

2 min reading time

When there’s a timely story and you have an active blog in place, you may end up on Google’s first page.

It happened for me just yesterday.

A colleague sent me an email on LinkedIn.

“Hey Joe, I am not sure if you saw this video or not, but I came across it and they highlight a Cardiac Science AED in the video. Always neat to see this!”

A school surveillance camera caught the whole scene: A young girl collapsed from sudden cardiac arrest. Students responded, teachers ran in, performed CPR, administered two shocks, and she responded.

I wrote a quick post. It took me about 15 minutes.

I called it “Child’s Cardiac Arrest Caught on Tape [Video]” – a catchy title to attract readers from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A friend with 73,000+ followers sent it out via Twitter. Another friend sent it out to her 31,000+.

But when it came to planning for search engines, I put cardiac-arrest-in-children in the URL and in the “title meta tag.”

I reasoned, “Cardiac Arrest in Children” is something you might actually search for, not the catchy title.

It worked. I showed up on page one for Cardiac Arrest in Children within the hour.

Be smart. Recognize your title, URL, and meta tags serve different purposes. Use them accordingly.

Postscript: That was then. This is now.

24 hours later, I wasn’t on page one. In fact, I was on page six!

Optimization is a never-ending exercise. For me to rank for that term on a long-term basis, I would have to write more about the subject and get influential sites to link to it.

So we can chalk this one up to a quick, short-lived victory. Do enough of them, something will stick and catch a prospect at just the right time.