My Exciting New Project

One of my new websites that I am currently working on (and excited about) is CancerFactsMD.com. This site will be focused on information such as cancer facts, diagnosis, treatment, symptoms, and much more. I will be using Jim Karter’s techniques for ranking websites. If you do not know who Jim is, he is a well respected SEO located in India who has successfully ranked websites and reportedly rakes in more than $50,000 per month in ad revenue from the combination of Adsense, Kontera, and others. He will be doing a case study that shows (step-by-step) how he will make a website from scratch that will achieve the $1,000/month level in ad revenue within an 18 month time frame. I encourage you to visit his website at JimKarter.com or you can go directly to his case study page located at: http://www.jimkarter.com/2008-03-10-case-study-making-money-long-term.html.

In Jim’s post he explains that his successful ranking strategy consists of slow link development coupled with literally tons of content. After all, “Content is King” in the search engines (as most SEO’s know)! I thought I would share his link building strategy with you below (its worth reading):

“This is the process of my website development and link building:

Day 1: Buy a domain which is good for the keyword you are looking to create a website.
Day 2: Create one page website (around 500 words) based on your keyword(s) and give around 3 to 4 links to wikipedia’s pages (related to your keyword). These wiki links will help search engines to assign a website-category to your site. Then get one backlink (I normally get this link from one of my own directory) for this site. Then forget about this site for a month. (in this time, you can start thinking on your next keyword site.)

Day 30 (After one month): Expand the website to 5 pages of content and get 4 more links, one each from a directory, a blog post, a social networking site and a regular site. Then again forget this site for a month.
Day 60 (after two months): This is the time when I start working on the website to make it 100 page website. I make sure that I have to get one back-link for each of my page I am creating. So after this phase is completed, I have just 5 links to my homepage and 1 link each to my internal pages. This internal pages link prevent your pages going into supplemental index of google.
Day 90 (after 3 months): This is the time when I start my FREE directory submissions. I follow all the new-directory announcement sections in various webmaster forums for new directories. These links are the easiest to get and for free. Other than these, I submit to around 1000 free directory list. It takes around 10 days of work.
Day 120: (after 4 months): At this time, I start looking for 3-way link exchanges. I do it in two ways. First one, the old regular method, by emailing the webmaster (but with very much personal touch). Secondly, on webmaster forums like Digital Point. I avoid doing reciprocal link exchange.
Day 150 (after 5 months): I add around 100 more pages to my site with 1 link each for every new page. Yes, this takes a lot of time but is really worth it. This is the point where I do around 20 article submissions. for backlinks to the homepage.
Day 180 (after 6 months): This is the time when I start spending money on the site to get links. I start submitting to paid directories (including good ones like: yahoo.com, botw.org, addalink.org, alivedirectory.com etc.). I start buying paid content-embedded links. I strictly avoid getting any site-wide links (except for directories, which is a different story all together).”

- Source JimKarter.com

As you can see after 60 days, Jim’s plan consists of having only approximately 105 links to the website he is attempting to rank, and 100 pages of content. The key to the success of these types of websites is the long tail keywords, which you should rank for effortlessly with this much content. I tested it out myself and I have only 5 pages of content so far on my cancer website and maybe 10 backlinks–I usually get about 2-3 visitors per page per day from long tail keywords and the site is only 4 weeks old, which isn’t too bad. If you multiply this 2-3 visitors per day times 100 pages you can see that it would be fairly easy to achieve 250 visitors a day without much link building. This number equates to nearly 7,500 visitors per month.

I encourage you to try and test out his strategy or share your advice in the comments section below. I think Jim’s insight is invaluable and hope you enjoyed it as well!

The UK Webmaster world SEO contest dubbed SEOcontest2008 is finally here! The competitive challenge kicked off at 12:00 AM (GMT) February 1st, 2008; literally dozens, if not hundreds, of competing search engine experts will be vying for the $1,000 1st place prize. SEO experts will be competing to rank #1 for the term SEOcontest2008 in Google using a variety of on-page optimization, link building, and other techniques. I have entered the competition as of today at 12:43PM and will be attempting to rank this page to win the competition (I have my fingers crossed).

What are the rules for ranking SEOcontest2008?

To give everyone a fair advantage all participants will be required to use a fresh, new page with no back links. The page must not be a previously cached page in Google.

Optimization Techniques Not Allowed to Compete For “seocontest2008″: All methods and techniques will be allowed in the contest with the exception of cloaking and using hidden text.

Is the Contest Fair? As of January 31st, there were no results in Google for the term SEOcontest2008 as of yesterday. This gives all competitors and SEO experts a “fair playing field” to rank for the term seocontest2008.

Who is Currently in the Lead (at the time of this posting)?

The top 3 for the keyword seocontest2008 in google are as follows:

1.) cbarker.ws/seocontest2008

2.) blinkbits.com/blinks/seocontest2008

3.) flashtechs.blogspot.com/2008/02/seocontest2008.html

How are they in the lead?

Well the competition just recently kicked off and these were some of the first pages about the UK seo contest out of the gate sort of speak. They were all cached by Google (crawled) within the first few hours after the competition began. These sites also have a decent amount of content and great on page optimization as well for the term seocontest2008 so I will continue to track their performance as well as my own.

Note: I will be updating this post soon with more information about the contest and how this site is performing! If your interested in participating the more the merrier; you can join at this link here: UK webmaster forum seo contest.

This post: SEOcontest2008

However, don’t let the phrase “less searched keywords” fool you! It doesn’t take an expert to realize that, if you’ve ever developed a ranked website, in most cases, over 60% of your traffic comes from these obscure, long tail keywords. They may not be as highly searched as much as the top terms on an individual basis ‘per se’ but they DO HAVE have advantage in numbers! Furthermore, these keywords are usually always less competitive, making long tail SEO marketing the”hidden gem” of SEO strategies. After reading nearly every article I could find on optimizing for long tail keywords, I realized that few SEO experts actually discuss how to properly implement this strategy into your campaign. I have first outlined some of the advantages of this SEO strategy followed by a step by step method to benefit from long tail keywords:

• Less competitive keyword terms
• More immediate and less volatile traffic
• Quicker results (no waiting for competitive terms to rank)
• More #1 SERP positions which typically generate 60-80% of the clicks on the first page.
• Higher conversion (potential buyers are usually ready to purchase and have already done there research)
• Diversifies your traffic sources (you’re putting your eggs in different baskets) so your less dependent on one or two major keywords.

So How Do I Start Using Long Tail Keyword Marketing?

Being the “SEO information philanthropist” that I am, I decided to take a step-by-step approach to walk you through an example. In this hypothetical example, lets pretend I own a digital photo frame retail e-commerce website.

Step 1.) Research the Long Tail Keywords

Using free tools such as hittail.com, Keyword Discovery’s keyword suggestion tool, and Google’s Suggest Lab I came up with the following list of long tail keywords:

Keywords (searches per month):

frames digital 71
kodak digital photo frames 53
digital frames under 100 52
digital photo picture frames 51
photo frames digital 44
digital fun frames 41
compare price digital photo frames 38
free digital picture frames 35
cheap digital picture frames 35
free disney digital photo frames 32
free digital fantasy frames 30
free digital photo frames 29
digital photo frames reviews 28
digital phot frames 25
digital photo frames internal memory 24
digital photo frames user 24
digital photo frames australia 23
discount digital photo frames 21
cheap digital photo frames 21
wireless digital picture frames 20
free winnie pooh digital photo frames 20
low priced digital photo frames 19
digital camera frames 19
digital photo frames mp3 18
digital picture frames for sale 18
picture frames digital 18
digital pcture frames 17
best resolution for digital photo frames 17
compare digital picture frames 17
free digital disney photo frames 16
winnie pooh free digital photo frames 16
disney digital frames download 16
“digital picture frames” 16
digital camera picture frames 16
digital scrapbook frames 16
digital frames on line uk 16
7″ digital photo frames 16
free digital picture frames clipart 15
best digital picture frames 15
digital photo frames target market 15
digital frames with usb ports 15
‘digital photo frame with interchangeable frames 14
phillips digital photo frames 14
3.5 inch digital picture frames 14
free digital baby photo frames 14
free shipping digital frames 13
free digital winnie pooh photo frames 13
digital pictuer frames 13
sony digital picture frames 13
cheapest digital frames 13
digital photo frames 10 inch 12
digital picture frames reviews 12
woolworths digital photo frames 12
decorative digital frames scrapbooking 12
free digital photo frames to download 12
free digital picturew frames 12
key chain digital photo frames 11
portable digital frames 11
kodak digital frames 11
kodak digital picture frames 11
lcd digital picture frames 11
frames for digital pictures 11
free download disney digital frames 11
24 frames per second digital camcorder 11
disney digital frames 11
discount digital picture frames 11
disney digital photo frames 11
new digital picture frames 10
digital disney photo frames 10
“digital photo frames” 10
digital photo frames freeware 10
digital pictures frames 10
review for digital photo frames 10
reviews digital picture frames 10
free frames for digital photos 10
free digital photo frames printable 10
free digital photo frames and borders 10
fun baby digital frames for free 10
westinghouse digital picture frames 10

Step 2.) Use the Long Tail Keywords in your Content

Google absolutely loves well written, quality content and this is the best method for increasing traffic from your long tail terms. The most important aspect is to determine which words most of these keywords have in common. In this case, these include: free, digital, frames, Kodak, and photo. After that, its just a matter of creating separate article pages on your site using these terms in the content. For best results, you should bold, italicize, and underline the most common words found in the long tail list that you generated in your newly created articles.

Another useful tip, is to make sure you use the keywords in a different order throughout the article. For instance, try and use both the phrase “frames for digital photos” and “digital photo frames”. When you flip the keywords around in your content, you increase your chances of ranking for both in Google. Remember, if the search engines come up with an exact match for the keyword you optimized will perform better in the SERPs.

Step 3.) Use Variations of Long Tail Keywords to Link to the Content you Created

The good news is that you shouldn’t need a lot of inbound links to rank your sub-pages for long tail keywords because there is significantly less competition. However, deep linking is helpful for ranking these pages and you should use a variety of long tail keywords in your anchor text. This has two benefits: your linking strategy will look more natural to Google so you can avoid getting “Google slapped” and, secondly, you will rank for more than one keyword. In addition, if your homepage ever achieves the #1 spot in google you might also get sitelinks, which takes place when Google shows more than 1 page of your website in the first result:

Step 4.) Track Your Results and See What Works

While this is probably “common sense”, it should still be mentioned. Find out which long tail keywords you are ranking for and determine what methods are working best so you can duplicate your results successfully in the future! Remember, that you shouldn’t ignore your main primary keywords; long tail marketing should be an addition to your campaign and not a replacement for the top 10 keyword terms in your niche. With a proper strategy consisting of SEO for both highly searched phrases and long tail keywords you should be well on your way to abundant traffic in no time!

Chris Anderson YouTube Video on SEO for Long Tail Keywords:

Chris takes a while to get to the SEO aspects in this video, however it gets quite interesting towards the end of the video and he has many useful comments and insight.

More Articles on Long Tail Keyword Marketing:

• Search Engine Guide
• Dosh Dosh
• Buzzle
• Marketing Hub

Technorati Profile

Does this mean an increase in your rankings if your PR went up? Simply put, no. However, it does mean that it will be much easier for you to find link partners and complete link exchanges, which does affect your position in the search engines.

Many sites are already discussing the first update of the new year including Matt Cutt’s blog at this post, whom in case you didn’t know is the official spokesperson and public relations guru at Google. He also went on to note in his blog post that, “…going forward, you’ll continue to see the supplemental results get even fresher, and website owners may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages.” This was a previous filter that many SEO experts had suspected Google might have recently introduced, but it has now been made official thanks to Matt. We shall continue to see how this affects rankings for blogs and fresh content in there algorithm.

Other forum threads and sites discussing the pagerank update for your convenience:

Web Master World

Digital Point Forums - Thread 1

Digital Point Forums - Thread 2

A few things I noticed about the pagerank update:

• fewer sites seem to be increasing in pagerank in this and other recent updates
• sites with a majority of paid links seem to have increased in PR very little (if any)

We will have to see how the rest of the websites perform in this update, but for now its just a waiting game until the pagerank update is officially finished.

An important concept to keep in mind is that one or two really good article directories like ezinearticles.com are better than 1,000 PR0 article directories. Quality is better than quantity in most cases. On that note here is a list of solid PR6+ article directories:

PR7:
magportal.com
webarticles.com
digital-women.com

PR6:
ezinearticles.com
bestezines.com
webpronews.com
buzzle.com
articledashboard.com
articlecity.com

Now I have submitted articles to some of these in the past, and now my some of my actual article pages are PR4+. That means I get an extremely relevant link with my keyword in the content, title tags, header tags, etc. and there are few other outbound links on the page. So this is exactly the type of link that will help me skyrocket to the top of the SERPs. For instance, look at this article I wrote:

http://www.bestezines.com/?What-You-Need-to-Know-Before-Purchasing-a-Body-Kit&id=4092

Its a PR4 and a great backlink that I wrote for an e-commerce website (EclipseCarTuner.com) a while back which jumps between #1 and #2 for the keyword mitsubishi eclipse body kits and eclipse body kits. The backlink from this article obviously helped me to achieve these excellent rankings. Make sure, however, that you first submit the article to your blog before any article directories. Just ping the blog (pingoat.com), wait for google to index it, and THAN submit the article to an article directory. If you follow this strategy, you will have a high ranking blog which Google considers to have unique content and you will also have high PR back links from article directories.