About a year ago I was reading about some words that were fairly new in the English language, words like cartology (looking in people's shopping carts and judging them based on how much beer or tofu you see in there).
Anyway, 2 of the words were right in one of my main niches so I checked to see if the .com names were available. One of them I had to add blog to the keyword and I now rank #5 in Google (8 in Yahoo). The other one I got the actual .com and now rank #2 in Google (same in Yahoo).
Now I'm not saying that I have good SERPs because I have good domain names. I'm saying I got in early. This is my chance to be accepted as a real authority site because I'll be one of the oldest sites related to the keyword. And being one of the currently few sites) means that when someone writes about my topic there's a good chance they link to me because they only have a few choices.
So find new words that relate to profitable niches (I don't see cartology becoming a high paying or high traffic keyword. Don't bother looking for the .com if you think I'm wrong - it's taken. I won't link there because it's some sort of spammy directory that claims to be about maps, but whatever. They have to make money somehow and no one is paying for courses in cartology yet...
Yes. Hell yes. I just started a new site a week or so ago and gae it one link from my paid directory. One link. I'm getting Google traffic - it's not big money traffic as this isn't a very profitable niche but it goes to show you that targeting specific keywords is just so easy in many cases. One link - I still can't believe it.
Once I have a few more links to make it harder for anyone else to start competing I'll show you the site.
An interesting and busy thread over at DP alerted me to a new tool for keyword research. Basically, you can see what some AOL users are searching for and what sites they end up going to.
I think it's a great addition to DP's keyword suggestion tool, Overture's bidding tool, and Adwords campaign estimated clicks for doing keyword research - I've gotten some ideas that I'm pretty excited about so check it out.
I'm just building my jethealth.com web site and did a search for jethealth to see what was out there. I found my domain name for sale on urlmerchant.com.
It smells like a scam though I suppose it could be an honest mistake if they are very very bad at their jobs.
Basically, I took my top 7 keyword pahrases and did a little research concerning where I am and where my competition is.
My old title: NFL-Giants: NY Giant news - New York Giants football will become NFL-Giants: NY Giants football news because New York Giants is too competitive and I'm already ranking for NY Giants related phrases.
1. new york giants
The top ten here consists mainly of news sites like ESPNs Giants page, New York Post, CNN Sports Illustrated, etc. I'm not in the top 100.
Yahoo's top 10 also has mostly news sites, followed by ticket sites. I'm #27.
422/day wordtracker, 918/day Overture.
2. ny giants
The top 10 here is also mostly team pages from large sites like Yahoo! I'm not in the top 100.
Mostly news sites in the top 10. I am #12.
202/day wordtracker, 477 day overture
3. giants
Not even going to bother. This also includes the San Fracisco Giants...
4. new york football giants
Less competition here. In the top 10 we see 2 ticket sites, something from answers.com, and some news sites. I'm not in the top 100.
I'm #5 on Yahoo.
2/day wordtracker
5. ny giants news
Not too competitive. I'm #4 on Google behind Giants.com, and two newspaper team pages.
I'm #1 on Yahoo.
7.8/day Overture
6. giants football
Mostly ticket sites in the top 10.
I'm #5 in Yahoo!
61/day wordtracker, 58/day overture
7. nfl giants
I'm #4 on Google, behind Giants.com and two NFL.com pages.
#3 on Yahoo.
21/day Wordtracker, 15/day Overture
So as Google was updating its SERPs, I was buying another website. A grunge music message board. Now I'm thinking about how to help it grow. Users agree that more users is wht we really need. So how do I get them?
I've decided to work on a pretty non-competitive keyword: Malfunkshun. This is a grunge band that grunge fans really love. People searching for this word are the kinds of people who really want to talk grunge and who can really contribute to a grunge community. Or so I hope...
As I've said before, message boards are quite valuable for SEO, especially now with the link coop...
Yhaoo! has sent over 5,000 people to my travel blog so far this month, helping to make it my most popular site! I'm up to #14 for "travel plan", #6 for "travel blog", and still #1 for "travel idea". My stupid Urchin stats aren't good at telling what yahoo! visitors are searching, but I know there must be other search terms at work here because travel blog and travel idea are not all that competitive....
Sponsored by Jobs Classifieds, a good place to look for job ads.
Here's an article that attempts (poorly) to differentiate between SEO and SEM.
They seem to be saying that SEO is more about designing a spider-friendly site and less about link building:
Generally, 90 percent of SEO relates to removing obstacles to the search engines finding and understanding the content's essence.Of course, you need a spider friendly site, but without a link building campaign there will never be good search engine rankings.
So I'm #19 for "English as a second language" and #23 for "English as a second langauge" because of a typo on my new header. Who would have though that the mispelling would be so competitive?
Obviously I'll be fixing this one because I can't have language wrong on a language site...
From my commission Junction newsletter:
"Your keyword list is gold!" exclaims James Martell, author of the popular Affiliate Marketer's Handbook. "You should begin every Web site project with a 200-400 word keyword list before starting any construction," he says. Then build one complete product page optimized to each keyword.Here are some tools for choosing keywords. I suppose if you ahve enough planning time, you would want to use the competitiveness of the keywords to help you organize your site. For example target highly competitive keywords on your index page, moderately competitive words and phrases on sub pages. and less competitive keywords on deep pages.
Also consider how lucrative a keyword is likely to be. More lucrative keywords deserve extra attention, even if they are not highly competitive. Of course finding lucrative keywords that aren't too competitive is quite difficult...
I just wrote about my SEO efforts leading to a #1 rank but being wasted because people are no longer searching for the keyword phrase. When I see what the keyword suggestion tools tell me people are searching for, I am amazed to see Overture reporsting 36 people/day searching for "investment market stock". Shouldn't it be "stock market investment"? Word tracker has "stock market investments" at 7/day and "stock market investment" at 4/day. "Stock mraket blog" doesn't show up on either wordtracker or overture (wordtracker does have stock market advice blog - 2/day). Investment blog shows no results and no suggestions, but I know someone is searching for it - it's the number one referral term for my stock market advice blog.
Sponsored by Keyword tracker
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php