Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

So a while back I did a little experiment to see if I could rank #1 for a keyword phrase in one day. By creating a site that morning, doing a bit of SEO and link building throughout the day and by the end of the day have a ranking site in Google. And not just ranking, but ranking well. I had seen it done previously by others, but hadn’t done it myself. And with Google’s index updating more rapidly over the last year, I knew that it was feasible to have a site go from nothing to ranking in a matter of hours or days.

Now typically, we tell our clients that it will take some time to see results and depending on the competitive set and the keywords they want to rank “well” for, it can be anywhere from two weeks to two months to two years, in extreme cases. In this case, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just see what I could do.

So one morning I read a story which threw out a bunch of buzzwords like microblogging, crowdsourcing, web 2.0, etc. and I said, this is getting out of hand. So I did a quick URL search to see what domains were available, purchased one I liked, set up a hosting plan, and posted some files I threw together quickly. All within the span of a few hours.
That’s step 1.

Step 2 is that I set up Google analytics and Google webmaster tools to ensure that Google would both crawl the site that day, as well as give me statistics on what traffic I could generate over the course of that day.

Step 3 is that I blogged about it via my own blog, posted it on Twitter where it was RT’ed a few times, and posted it to Sphinn, Digg, Del.icio.us and a few other social bookmarking sites. And by the end of the day, VOILA! You can see the results below.

So if you are in crisis mode or you really drop the ball on some marketing effort, there is still some hope that you can make up for it by creating, optimizing, and launching a site all in one day*.

*DISCLAIMER – subject to competitive set, age of your website, amount of traffic on your website, your websites authority in your space, content to support your optimization, your knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc. etc. etc. Do not try this at home – results will vary