If every time you entered a new niche you knew with a sense of certainty that you get 100 visitors of free traffic per day within the first 6 months then that’d be pretty good right?
That’s what this post is all about – it’s a brain dump of what I’ve done to get new sites to that first milestone.
If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know that actually I pretty much hate SEO – I’m too impatient and it’s too volatile – but I can’t deny that getting 100 visitors to your niche site every day is valuable!
Case Study: Cloudhosting.co.uk
This is actually a site I built when I was a partner in the web hosting company Krystal (these guys are thoroughly recommended by the way).
The site has ranked top for the term “cloud hosting” and numerous other phrases like “cloud hosting providers” for the UK version of Google’s search results above multi million dollar companies like Rackspace.
Obviously, web hosting is a lucrative sector, so even though the site isn’t being monetised currently (I’ll be working on that over the next few weeks) it is at the 100 hundred highly targeted visitors per day mark and has been since it was about 4 months old. It also currently holds a PageRank 5 which means it’s “important” in Google’s eyes.
Having taken about 6 months off from building niche sites, I recently created another one for the “Watch Me Make Money” series on Leoandpaul.com that’s around 3 months old and is in the top 10 for its main keyword of 6,600 searches and numerous other key phrases. I don’t want to mention the domain on here because it’ll warp the analytics traffic stats, but I’ll reveal it in the future.
So I’ll use my experiences from these two sites (and a couple of others that I won’t mention because they’re my little secret!) to describe how I go about buying a new domain and developing it to the point where it gets 100 visitors per day…
Part 1 – How to be Certain your Ranking is Valuable
Who likes wasting time? Yeah, me neither. SEO can be a HUGE waste of time if you mess up. Imagine optimising your site for a keyword that gets loads of search volume but is 100% non commercial…
I’ve done this before – see my film site spittinflicks.com. I must have built this site about five years ago before I really knew what I was doing – I optimised the site for the keyword “film forum” and it ranks #1 or #2 in Google for that key phrase. Unfortunately, the value of this keyword is next to nothing – it was a complete waste of my time – lesson well and truly learned! Still, I now have a popular film community at least (if you like films then make me an offer! 
).
The bottom line is this: Before you undertake any kind of project where your main source of traffic is the search engines you should roughly know the value of ranking for your target keywords. In a game where it can take months to get ranked – are you willing to risk not knowing how valuable a ranking actually is?
Here’s how I go about measuring the worth of a natural listing:-
1. Estimate total traffic for that Keyword
If I’m lazy, I’ll use the Adwords keyword tool (set to “exact match” and to the location that I’m targeting – ie. for Cloud hosting that was the “UK”) and grab the estimated traffic amounts from there.
If I’m taking on an extensive project and want reliable data then I’ll invest a bit of cash in an Adwords campaign and run an ad at 100% impression share. Impression share is an Adwords metric that shows you the percentage of how often your ad is displayed against the total possible displays for any given period.
You can only ever lose impression share due to “bid price” or “budget” so I make sure to bid high and have a nice high budget. Of course, I don’t want anyone to click my ads because that costs me money – so I make my ad copy unattractive and run the campaign for a few days.
As a side note: On adwords It is not a straight forward auction process whereby the highest bidder gets the highest ad positions. Your bid “score” is determined by a combination of your “quality score” multiplied by your bid price. And it is the bid “score” that is used to determine where your ads are ranked in relation to the competition.
To keep a low bid price, you need a high quality score. There are many things that go into getting a high quality score – relevance, ad click through rate, account history etc. Now, as I mentioned before – I don’t want a high click through rate because clicks cost me money. Therefore my low click through rate may lower my quality score, which means my bid price has to be higher to remain on the front page for the 100% impression share that I’m after.
At the end of this little test I have some reliable data that will tell me exactly how many searches are occuring for any keyword.
2. Consider the Click Through Percentage on Natural Listings
So, now we have an idea of the true search volume for any given keyword we can estimate how many clicks a top 3 position will generate for us.
Thanks to SEO Researcher we have a study showing the likelihood that someone will click your link in relation to organic positioning in the search engines:-
This data trends very closely with AOL’s leakage of click through data so it would appear to be a pretty accurate representation of what actually happens.
Notice how the #1 position gets over 4 times more clicks than #2 and over 5 times more clicks than #3. It just goes to show that it is worth going after that number one position!
When I enter a niche, I’m confident that I will get top spot – so I take the 56.34% as a guideline. If you aim for a top 3 position then take 14.72% and so on…
Total traffic to your site = searches * estimated click through rate
The final part of this analysis stage is to place a dollar value on a visitor.
How much is a Visitor Worth?
100 visitors for the keyword “why is the sky blue?” is worth nothing. 100 visitors for the keyword “extended stay hotels” is worth considerably more:-
Yeah, that’s right – advertisers are paying on average $157 per click to get someone to their web site for that keyword.
So, the first thing I always do is try and place a figure on how much 100 visitors for any given keyword is worth…
For cloudhosting.co.uk this wasn’t possible. Here’s why: Cloud hosting was something new that not many people knew about when I created the site and, even today, the cost per click data for the term “cloud hosting” is way off base:-
This is why you sometimes need to take the estimated average cost per click in the Google Adwords Keyword tool with a pinch of salt. If I take the same keyword “cloud hosting” and put it into Google, just look how many ads there are:-
As I mentioned earlier, Google’s advertising platform (Adwords) is a bidding platform. Essentially, you bid for position. So with so many advertisers bidding on the keyword “cloud hosting” you can be sure of two things:-
- The average cost per click is a lot more than £0.05
- There’s money to be made from this keyword
Having worked in the hosting industry, I can tell you that people tend to choose a host and stick with them for a long period of time. A lot of these advertisers will be willing to sacrafice any year 1 margins because they know that they’ll make the money on the rebills. In other words, they’re likely bidding a couple of dollars per click at least.
Of course, if you’ve run the Adwords campaign back in step 1 then you’ll have a rough idea of what people are paying for the traffic.
Total keyword value = incoming clicks from Google x estimated visitor value
That’s it – that’s how you make sure that you’ll be able to monetise traffic when you get your #1 Google listing!
A Final thing to Consider when Estimating Search Traffic Volume
Long tail keywords will usually make the majority of your traffic. In other words, if you ranked for “make money online”, you’d get search traffic from people typing in “make money online writing articles”. And it’s extremely difficult to accurately predict how much traffic a #1 ranking will truly get you because of this long tail trend.
To give you an idea, an article on Search Engine Journal reported that 78% of visitors came from long tail keywords as opposed to head keywords in their small analysis.
Part 2 – Buy an Exact Match Domain if Possible
Let’s say your ranking your site around one major keyword and a bunch of sub keywords – having an exact match domain for your main keyword helps you to get ranked, without doubt.
This is especially true on Bing – their weighting towards having keywords in the domain name is much higher than that of Google. It’s surprisingly easy to get an a site ranked if you have an EMD.
Obviously, if an exact match domain isn’t available or you want to brand your site with something more memorable than howtotrainyourpetalsatian.com then just go for it. With over 300 ranking factors in Google an exact match domain is just a drop in the ocean.
Part 3 – Nurture your Immature Site!
A new site takes time to rank highly for half competitive keywords. Some people say it’s a sandbox, some people say it’s a filter; quite frankly I don’t know what it is – but it’s there.
And when you develop a new site, you have to be pretty careful about what you’re doing and the kind of signals you’re sending to Google. I have had too many sites “nuked” from ranking because I rushed things in the first 4 – 8 weeks.
On one particular occasion, I built a hotel portal for my local town and aggressively developed the site in its first 8 weeks….
- I over optimised the landing pages with my main keyword in the title, h1, h2, meta, content and internal links
- I built backlinks like a nutter through mass article submissions
- I created backlinks from other sites in my portfolio with PR of 4 or above (bad idea!)
- The anchor text of my backlinks were my main key phrase (no anchor text diversity)
The result of this extremely ambitious site development campaign wasn’t pretty. Google applied an algorithmic filter to my site – all pages across the domain had poor rankings. If you typed in my main keyword “swindon hotels” into the search engine a deep content page showed up before my homepage – if this ever happens to your site then you’re probably being subject to a filter. Either that or your SEO plain sucks!
This blog you’re reading now, however, had a PageRank of 4 around 1 month after the domain was registered and seemed to get half decent rankings pretty quickly (note that it has since dropped to a PageRank 2!). So, to my mind, this means there are ways of sending the “right” signals to Google so that you can rank quickly…
The Google TrustRank Thing…
You’ve probably heard of PageRank but you may not have necessarily heard ot TrustRank. It’s something I’ve been looking at extensively over the past 6 months to try and figure out how important it is in rankings…
Verdict: It’s very important.
Google wants to rank “trustworthy” sites. But how the heck do you do that without human intervention? Well, there are patents filed that suggest Google is using “trust by association” factors to determine whether a site is likely to be spammy or not…
It works like this. The big G manually pick a sample of say 200 sites that they know are highly trustworthy. Sites like BBC news, CNN, Harvard university et al. On these sites there is literally 0% chance of spam. I have no idea of the list, but it’s not too hard to imagine what type of sites would be.
Once this sample set has been selected, the theory goes like this: if you’re linked to from one of these sites then that’s a major trust boost for your site. The more hops your site is from a “trusted” domain, the less trustworthy your site is, and vice versa.
There’s obviously a heck of a lot more to it than this, the basic principle remains true. And this is why SEO’s are trying to get their links on .edu, .gov and other “trustworthy” domains.
So, anyway, my point is this:-
If you can get contextual, editorial links from trustworthy domains then it’s seemingly easy to overcome this new site filter.
The question is, how do you get these links?
Old Style Article Marketing Doesn’t Cut The Mustard!
The average internet marketer does what I call “old style” article marketing. They’ll put their content on the big article directories and consider that a good way to build backlinks.
Unfortunately, most of these links are pretty weak in value. Sure they have some effect, but mass submission of articles to article directories is certainly not sending the right signals to the big G.
A better approach is to find a list of publishers in your niche and find ways of getting your content on their site. The higher the authority of the publisher, the better.
In the internet marketing niche, you’d put your content on places like http://www.sitepronews.com and http://www.quickonlinetips.com.
I’m currently doing a lot of work in the travel industry building links for a popular holiday destination and over the course of about an hour I came up with almost 50 publishers that were looking for content for their site. These links are high value, trustworthy, contextual, will last the test of time and can help bolster your rankings in a big way.
Another way of getting links from high trust domains is to write a press release. And I mean submit a proper press release rather than using junky sites like http://www.prlog.org.
These do cost, however – the one I like to use is prweb.com and it costs around $200 per submission. I submitted a press release in February and it received widespread publication and did wonders for the link popularity of the site I was working on.
Create Keyword Driven Incredible Content…
*Yawn* – I know – the whole “create amazing content” spiel again.
But now, more than ever, it’s important that you create unique content that’s valuable. The farmer update has made it so that just a small subset of poor content on your site can have repercussions for the whole domain.
I personally like to write quite lengthy articles and include some form of multimedia where possible, simply because in many instances this is a more valuable experience for the end user and that’s something Google may give credit for.
Obviously, if you’re trying to rank a piece of content in Google then you’re going to need to perform keyword research. Keyword research alone is a 10,000 word topic so I won’t go into too much detail in this post, but you’ll want to dig up a bunch of keywords that you think is valuable for rankings.
When you’re creating your content for these keywords you need to be careful of overoptimisation. 5 years ago standard SEO practice was to put the keyword in all “important” areas of the page – so the title, h1, meta description and on the page a number of times. One thing I’ve noticed recently is that it’s pretty easy to overdo your on-site optimisation (as I mentioned with my swindon-hotels.org site).
My advice is to definitely include your keyword in your title – but don’t make it your complete title (for example “Alsatian dog training – the 30 day Success Program” might be a good title for the keyword “Alsatain dog training”). I tend to follow a similar pattern for the h1 tag. Of course, mention the keyword a few times in the post body aswell.
Remember, Google ranks pages – you need to have a unique keyword for each page you’re focusing on ranking. I always have my main keyword (for the homepage) and then 5 additional keywords to target aswell. I’ll usually grow my keyword list over time, but this is a decent starting point.
Pay Attention to your Site Structure
This is what a site usually looks like:-
You have your homepage, a series of sitewide sub-pages and then posts.
Google indexes content by following links. The more links it has to follow to reach a piece of content on your domain, the lower the likelihood of:-
- That piece of content getting indexed
- That piece of content ranking highly
Please understand – those two points are massive generalisations – with enough link popularity you can get any page at any level to rank well…But site structure can facilitate rankings for your main pages.
Obviously your main keyword is your homepage. I recommend that the sub-pages (ie. those are linked to sitewide) target your secondary keywords.
This is a simple way of saying to the big G “these pages are important”.
Submit your Sitemap
Sitemaps are exciting bits of content:-
Can you detect the sarcasm?
Sitemaps aren’t meant for humans – they’re for search engines. It’s simply an easy way of letting the search engines know the structure of your site and what content should be indexed.
Most blogging platforms will allow you to install a plugin or a module so your sitemap is automatically generated. Here’s my beautiful sitemap!.
It’s always good practise to create a Google webmaster tools account and submit your sitemap through there:
Make your site Search Engine Friendly…
I won’t talk too long about this because this is farily basic stuff, but here’s a quick checklist for you:-
- Enable Search engine friendly URLs
- Include Meta tags on all pages
- Make sure pages load fast (chat with your web host if there are concerns)
- Monitor webmaster tools account for any crawl errors
I’ll elaborate slightly more on that last one. In Google webmaster tools any crawl errors that Google experiences is reported in the “Diagnostics” section:-
It’s always worth checking in from time to time to make sure that there aren’t any significant problems with your site…
You can also see Google’s view of page load times in the “Site Performance” section:-
Build Link Popularity to your Site
We’re now at the stage where we can start the main backlinking. You’ve already built a few high trust links back to your site (through guest posting and press release submission) so now we can start doing other forms of “lower quality” link building.
My approach to backlink building is to hit the home page first for my key term (and exact match domain) before focusing on other pages.
The other thing to realise is that you’re going to be creating a lot of content unless you outsource your article writing. It’s worth thinking about getting 50 unique articles put together to accelerate this process.
Alternatively, if you’re writing all these articles yourself because you’re on a tight budget then do youself a favour and grab a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking! (version 11 of DNS is out, but version 10 is very good and much cheaper to buy!).
Grab some Profile Links
Some people use profile links as a spammy backlinking weapon (sorry Shane, couldn’t resist mate!). And I have to admit, I’ve contributed to my fair share of the spam web testing things like xrumer and link packets.
But let’s be honest, we want longevity with our rankings. And spamming the crap out of forums across the web is not a long term approach to link building – eventually Google will algorithmically render these links redundant.
There are, however, a few juicy profile link opportunities that are just too good to ignore. Take YouTube, for example. The profile link in a YouTube channel is a “follow” link – in other words it counts as a “vote” in the search engine rankings:
It gets better. When you leave a comment on somebody else’s channel, you get a follow link back to your own channel. And, there are many PR7 YouTube channel profile pages that you can comment on…
In other words, you can get a follow link from a PR7 page to a page that links to your site within a few minutes. The only let down is that you can’t have optimised anchor text, but it’s still worth having I’d say…
So, instead of mass submitting profiles with xrumer, find some of the larger web sites and link back to your site.
Web 2.0 Sites
You’ve probably heard all about these before – you can create pages on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly, Tumblr and Livejournal and backlink to your main site. This is hugely boring work, but is still very worth doing.
I tend to add a couple of unique articles to each web 2.0 site before moving on to the next one.
You can also do some form of interlinking between the web 2.0 sites, but make sure it’s in a random “undetectable” fashion. Plain standard link wheels stopped working a long time ago!
Standard Article Marketing..
Don’t bother with these 2,000 article directory submitters. Submitting to most of those directories is a waste of time – You’re much better off finding the top directories and submitting to those. I’d recommend these to start with:-
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.articlealley.com
Guest Posting
I’ve mentioned this earlier on in this post, but I place extremely high value in guest posting. Contact publishers in your niche and get your content on their site with a backlink back to your site. These are links of the highest quality and cannot be overlooked in my opinion.
You can find these sites easily by doing a simple Google search…Something like this:-
dog training + “guest post”
dog training + “write for us”
dog training + “submit your article”
You get the idea. Within a few minutes you have a complete list of publishers at your disposal.
Blog Networks
If you’re John Wayne in the SEO saloon then you can turn to black hat blog networks such as BuildmyRank.com. They still work, that’s for sure, the question is – how long before these networks are discovered and devalued?
A lot of these networks have a very similar footpring; The articles are all very short, of no particular topic, always contain optimised backlinks and the content is pretty poor.
BuildmyRank is one of the few services that allow you to specify the subject of your post so that it will at least end up on a relevant site. Like I said – these services work today, not sure for how long though – you’d be crazy to just use buildMyRank as your backlinking strategy!
This is Important…
Backlinks to your site can hurt you in the same way that over optimising on site can hurt you.
I’ve heard the argument “if backlinks can hurt you then surely I can build backlinks to my competitors’ sites and get them all banned” so many times – it seems logical – but it just doesn’t hold up.
I know this, because I’ve seen it happen so many times to my sites, and friends of mine. A lot of the top SEOs have blogged about it, too.
Here’s the important thing to remember: If your profile is too highly optimised then you run the risk of breaching an optimisation threshold and you may be filtered.
Young sites seem to get susceptible to this more than old sites – although I have had this happen to one of my PR5 domains that was bought 8 years prior to the filter being applied – so older sites are certainly not immune. I have to admit, though, that the site was punished off the back of an extremely aggressive and highly targeted link building campaign.
The thing to do is diversify your anchor text when building backlinks to your pages. The anchor text is simply the clickable part of the link. Around 50% of the time I’ll have the anchor text as my main keyword. 25% of the time I’ll have a sub keyword for the same page, and the rest of the time I use anchors such as “click here”, “learn more” and the actual URL of the page.
Step 5 – Be Consistent
Top rankings simply don’t occur overnight for even slightly competitive key phrases and you should know that there will be a period of time during which you’re building links and nothing seems to be happening.
That’s just part and parcel of Search Engine Optimisation I’m afraid. There is a lag time between you putting a backlink out there and the link being indexed. Then there will likely also be a lag time before the backlink comes into effect for your ranking once it’s been indexed.
And the question is always how long? The answer is, it’s impossible for me to tell you. What I will say though is that if you’re doing this for the first time, then choose a group of keywords that is not too competitive. This will make the “dip” shorter and you’ll get results faster. This will give you the confidence to throw up a new site with a longer dip, but more financial reward.
Successful Internet Marketers v Failing Internet Marketers
I’ve been luck enough to talk to and meet a lot of highly successful internet marketers over the past few years and I really pay attention to exactly what it is that makes them successful rather than the next guy….
My incredible discovery is that it’s hardly ever because their internet marketing knowledge is any better than the rest of the IM crowd – rather that they are strategists and stick with one thing until it makes money.
They don’t jump from project to project – they don’t spread themselves too thinly – they simply decide on a strategy, acknowledge that there will be a dip before they earn financial reward and get through it.
This SEO plan is something that won’t give you instant gratification and will require consistent work for it to be achieved. Either commit to it, or don’t. Anything inbetween those two ends of the spectrum is a waste or your time.
I’m going to bring this ridiculously long blog post to a close – how do you rank your sites? What have you found to work best when getting top Google rankings? Tell me in the comments box below…
The experts series is coming as soon as I can find the time to finish it!! And, I’ve changed the comments box to Facebook style – apparently it’s what all the cool kids are doing – if you could leave me a comment so I know it works that would be fantastic 
