First post but I have browsed the forums for a while. I am not an SEO expert - probably more like a step or two up from being a complete amateur. I own an outdoor related site that is targeted towards a single state - its everything from hunting to fishing. The past 30 days are 15,790 sessions, 5,759 unique visitors and 98,495 page views. Its 99% a vbulletin forum.

I also own a bunch of other niche sites but all informational wordpress blogs that are hosted by me. So I did a good bit of keyword search and found a great longtail (4 words) and the domain name was available.

So I bought it and created a blog - the goal was to create a site where charter captains would send their daily reports, I would create a custom report and include some pics. The adsense potential is weak but other advertising potential is good and this is more or less a test for me on understanding SEO - again I have read enough to screw stuff up royally.

My goal was to run an experiment and see how fast I can get content on the first page of Google, Bing and Yahoo. Can a complete donk follow some rules and make it happen quickly.

On May 9th I launched oregoninletfishingreports dot com - used a generic theme (Twenty Ten) and did the following - I did this because I believed this to be a good approach. And I might be wrong.

Installed Yoast SEO but I need to learn so much more about it
Added Google Analytics and added the site to Google and Bing webmaster tools
Submitted XML Sitemaps
Created a link with the anchor text as my keyword from my other fishing site and placed it in the footer of my other forum

My primary keyword is the name of my site, and with that I:
Made sure that the keyword was in each blog post
I followed the Yoast guidelines within each post
I made sure there were several pics in each post
Each pic had the keyword at the beginning of the file name
The Alt text and description has the same schema as the filename
I linked each fishing report back to that months reports for ease of use and the anchor text is the keyword

I am sure some of you are looking at this and thinking - why in the world would someone do this or not do that. Like I said - and average Joe doing some things that I read about

So here are the results so far
May 9th launched
May 10th received 2 organic visits from bing and 1 from yahoo
May 10th launched a Facebook ad campaign to drive social traffic
May 12th ranked in the 20's for my primary keyword on Bing and Yahoo
May 16th on the first page of Bing and Yahoo #79 on Google
May 19th first page for Bing and Yahoo #55 on Google
May 22nd #3 on Bing #8 on Yahoo #27 Google

As of May 22nd
Facebook Followers 2,575
507 Sessions
396 Uniques
948 Pageviews

I am always open to any advice you may have - I feel like I have made some good progress but I am sure there are some things that I just dont know.

My goal is to fine tune what I know and dont know about SEO and to land on the first page of Google inside 30 days - if its possible.

Thanks!