This is just an example of what is possible when you start to merge the concepts of Web 1.0 SEO and Web 2.0 user generated content.
In the old days, it was all about managing every last word on your own website to “optimize” your site for the search engines. The problem with this is that SEO is a “cat and mouse game” and Google has a mouse that resembles the Terminator. You can go nuts constantly retuning your site every time Google spins a knob at HQ which causes your #1 ranked page to suddenly become #10.
One solution is to have multiple pages which cover a set of keywords in order to provide more than one search result. This requires multiple domains because most of the search engines filter out results if they all come from the same site. Why not build content on other sites (always, always quality content) and point a single link or banner back at your main site? This has been done in the past under the guise “butterfly marketing” where a business owner registers a dozen domains and points content in towards the “money site.”
Doing it with social media properties takes this concept to the next level. If you select the right Web 2.0 sites for your content, you get indexed and rank very quickly. Most of these sites get money from ad displays so as long as you produce QUALITY content, you’re benefiting them with your creations. Finally, these sites allow people to interlink and comment on your content easily which plugs you into the social community.
Here’s an example to get you started.
First, go to WordTracker to find the keywords you need to make any of this possible. They offer a 7 day, fully-functional free trial so there’s no reason not to try this.
When you log into your WordTracker account, you’ll get the initial view.
Click Keyword Universe.
The next sequence is where I do 90% of my work in Wordtracker.
For this example, I entered Vitamin C in the Related Keywords box and clicked Proceed…you’ll have to wait for up to 60 seconds after doing this.
Next, scroll down to see a list of keywords that WordTracker thinks are related to what you entered. For this example, I’m just going to click Vitamin C beside the 1. Over on the right, the display will change to show up to 300 phrases which contain Vitamin C.
Click Click here to add all keywords to your basket and then click Click here for Step 3 at the bottom of the window.
In the next window click Competition Search
In the next window, this is where we get to do some very cool stuff that is very annoying to do without WordTracker.
First, at the top the keywords popup starts with 1-100 selected. We’re going to do competition research for just this first 100 keywords to find out how many searches (on average) happen per day for each keyword compared to the number of other pages there are in Google which already match that phrase.
To do that, click the Google checkbox and the click Proceed.
After a short wait, the screen changes and we can see the first 100 keyword research results. If you wanted to do research for keywords 101-200, you’d change the selection in the popup menu, check the Google box and click proceed. It seems a little tedious and I think WordTracker does this on purpose. If they made this process too fast, Google might be forced to find a way to shut them down.
Ok, what did we find? Check out the very first result.
“Amount of vitamin C in energy drinks” the KEI number is based on a formula that compares searches to the number of competing results. Anything higher than 10 is worth your attention. We’ve found a 400 so that’s really good.
This phrase gets about a dozen searches a day and there are 0 other pages that contain this phrase?
Jackpot
I then went to hubpages.com and build a hub page that provides information about the “Amount of vitamin C in energy drinks”
In two hours, I ended up with 4 pages that ranked for this phrase. Two from Digg, and two from hubpages. This is a short term result. Things will shift around a bit over time, but the point here is that I was able to find a keyword with very low competition and got my own content indexed in a very short period of time. This didn’t require any dirty tricks and it will work for any niche.
In the above screen capture, I searched for the phrase in quotes. This forces Google to return results only if they match the phrase exactly. In my lucky find of a keyword phrase that had 0 other so-called literal matches, that makes it look like I’m the only one who’s showing up in Google. That would be true if I expected other people to search for that phrase in quotes as well…and I don’t.
So what are my results when I remove the quotes? Google will try to find anything that seems to talk about the searched phrase which means a lot more results. In fact, I get over 850,000 suggestions from Google when searching for amount of Vitamin C in energy drinks without the quotes.
Will you look at that? I took this screen shot 2 days after creating the rest of the example and I have the top 2 results of 850,000.
Yahoo was kind enough to give me the #1 slot of 3,170,000 “close matches”.”
The new search engine on the block, Bing, gave me the top two out of 1,740,000 results.
I used hubpages in this example and there are plenty of other sites which can be used as well, including your own blog. This isn’t something you do once, but rather it should be a regular process of building content around your niche that is speaking to the things people are actually entering into the search engines.
Building quality content on the Internet is a long-lasting strategy for building a steady flow of traffic to your website. I know a lot more about SEO than what I’m demonstrating here and I used none of that knowledge to make the above example work. In a more competitive space, it would take a little more effort to get results like these, but if you are constantly building new properties and monitoring keyword trends in WordTracker, you will be found and you will receive a steady stream of website traffic, new leads, new sales and mo’ money. It takes effort so either build the habit of doing it yourself, or get someone else to do it for you.
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