With a stop at Gili Trawangan before reaching Lombok’s north-west pier of Teluk Kode, by taking fast boat visitors can get to Gili Islands in only 1.5 hours. Very short and comfortable compared to going to the airport, wait for departure with huge change of delays, fly over to Lombok, get into a one hour overland trip to the pier, wait for boat, and finally about 30 minutes cruise across the narrow straits before we finally land at one of the Gili Islands. The new Lombok Raya International airport even add another one hour overland trip to reach Gili Islands. 

The situation is immediately reflected in the cyberspace, with search for tourism related information about Gili Islands, including accommodation, surpassed Lombok itself, despite of what Lombok has to offer being quite a large island on its own. Villa rental accommodation is not an exception with search for Gili villas that continuously way higher than search for Lombok villas.

Knowing by thorough assessment that the website we used to catch higher ranking for Lombok villas could not – and should not – be leveraged to get decent ranking on Gili villas as well, we decided to establish a new website showcasing all villa rental portfolio in Gili Islands and geared to get the top position for Gili villas.

Today for the first time we framed achievement of the first page on Google search engine result page (SERP) for Gili villas ahead of 2,340,000 competition. It is normal and expectable that rankings are quite shaking at the beginning.But shooting right to the top spot is a very good start.

We are not in our track to changing our technological policy, however it is essential to learn how SEO-friendliness of WordPress is built and operated, if it is at all works as good as most WordPress advocates believe. Our ultimate objective is if it is proven that WordPress search-engine friendliness is way ahead our own system, then we will start researching on components that we can build into our own system.

So first step comes first, testing an implementation to prove if WordPress SEO-engine does work.

1. We choose an quite-aged but practically unused domain. The domain is keyword rich and we will be targeting the website into exact keyword as the domain has. We chose balivillaaccommodation.com aimed for one single keyword target Bali Villa Accommodation.
2. We install the latest WordPress into the root.
3. We design a template that we believe is appealing to both human visitors and search engine robots.
4. We install various relevant plugins especially those related to search engine friendliness.
5. We continuously build content in an interval of one new product posting every one to three days. We intentionally make the pattern irregular.
6. Following natural blogging practice, content is freshly written. Each product description is completely rewritten.
7. Following SEO best practices, all product postings are carefully crafted with keyword and relevant words in each important element including title, description, meta, paragraphs, image file name, image caption, etc.

Result

With only 11 real posts, first posting made on February 16th 2012, which is 2 months (plus 2 days) ago, this morning we saw it at the top – first spot of the first page – for the targeted keyword against 2,570,000 competing pages.

Conclusion

As it normally does, SERP will be quite shaky for a while, means few months. However, reaching the top in such a tight competition in only 2 months, with only 11 pages (plus homepage, categories, and tags which does not really count anyway), is an absolutely stunning result. On this there is an additional aspect to note: we did not do off page SEO things like link building etc.

Proof

Continuously monitoring our operation in 2011 and foreseeing upcoming growth in 2012 our board decided to increase the capacity of our technology team. With additional strength at its core, our marketing department is expected to be able to fast track development of new online marketing instruments as well as maintaining and improving existing components.

In November we welcomed three following professional in online technology and digital marketing:

Ardian Riffhardy – Web Programmer

Born and raised in Bogor, a satellite town outside Jakarta, Ardian took his degree in information technology in Jakarta. Before taking his decision to relocate himself to Bali, he gained his professional experience from various web development firms in Bogor and Jakarta.

His expertise includes PHP programming and MySQL database along with various latest web development technology including JQuery, JSON, HTML5, CSS3, and CodeIgniter.

Mohammad Sokeh – Web Developer

From the cool mountain town of Malang in East Java where he was hailed, Sokeh inherits a cool personality allowing him to harness his creative mind and protect it from distraction. Collecting his degree in information technology from his hometown, he brought in a creative talent to design visually appealing designs as well as implementing them in the most technically effective way.

Janu Anggriawan – Social Media Marketing Executive

Believing that social media will become an integral part of digital marketing we decided that it is the time for us to have a dedicated professional to bring our social media marketing initiatives into a higher degree. Janu was born and collected his education from a tourism school back in his hometown, Jogja.

Having proven successful track in Twitter and Facebook Janu is now also leading researches in the newest social media platform, Google+.