Classic pitfall: Creating way too many pages that don’t rank for the keywords you’re going for.
Solution: Create one page that does.
It’s all a matter of focus…
Thoughts?
Tags: SEO
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Absolutely. Clear and consise titles/headers are vital to ranking. You can take what might seem like a trivial sub-niche and really dive into it to blow away any competition.
Make a list. Do an interview. Once you’re out there the link love will flow, and so will your ranking.
So, basically what I am understanding is, create the optimized post, and you’re done with that.
The real work is getting the links to that post.
Enter Article Marketer right?
@will – Well said! There are still TONS of small niches that could be taken over by anyone that found them and tried.
@matt – That’s basically it! I’m going to be writing about some alternatives to Article Marketer that I’ve really started liking. AM still provides you with value and you should use it until you have something different.
Court,
Looking forward to hearing about those other alternatives. I am thinking I may have done the thing you mentioned with my gout blog. I have 20 some posts on them, but while I thought my posts were keyword driven, I think I should’ve done fewer posts and made them more keyword and content specific.
Medic usually what we do is just keep creating posts instead of promoting the ones we already have. It’s basic human instinct – what we don’t have is more appealing than what we do. If we spend more time promoting our posts, they will do a lot better.
what would be considered a “small niche”
A small niche Mo is any niche that isn’t competitive. If you find a keyword phrase that has weak sites (say PR2 or less) that currently rank in the top 5, it should be fairly easy to get ranked.
court,
i talked about : unique article wizard.
That should one of the alternatives I guess.
Unique article wizard is a really great service…
@ medic,
I think Court is referring to not just the content, but building the link infrastructure to the content. I would tend to believe that you could write a poorly optimized post, but get it to rank well just based on the proper linking structure.
Matt
The link structure is definitely most of the game.
Court, I have a question about buying backlinks. Is this something that is advantageous? Will the G penalize me for doing it? You have helped me to understand the value of backlinks and I am wondering if this is a common practice.
Thanks.
Well Larry links are almost always advantageous. If Google finds out they definitely won’t like it. This isn’t something I normally do but there are lots of people that make a lot of money buying links.
matt, I agree with you about getting a post to rank well with good backlinks in spite of the quality of the post. I just think I need to clean up my post titles, and do a better job of putting more words related to my post title into the article. I am getting better at it.
And I seriously need to work better at getting backlinks. I’ve read court’s 102 backlinking post, I just need to do a better job of implementing it.
Hi Court,
So let’s say we have a blog. Would it be better to just make one post to that blog that is on page SEO and then spend the rest of our time doing off page instead of creating 10 more posts that are all sort of off page optimized?
How important is new content on the blog vs backlinks?
Thanks for the info
Backlinks by far is the most important things Andy. With a blog, however, there is a ton of power that you can get from getting linked to from your audience. You usually have to post more to get a larger audience.
Basically the backlinks are what we need and the audience of a blog and the posts of a blog are the tools we use to get the links.
Court,
As linking to this blog in my blog, would you like the post title to be the anchor text?
If you’re going to link to the homepage Andy the ideal thing for us would be ‘Make Money At The Keyword Academy’.
So are you saying you should create one very large page, by that I mean rather than doing 5 separate pages just put all those pages in to one big page?
It’s actually more a matter of getting the content there and then promoting properly by getting the right links!
I’ve actually found, with the proper SEO tools (All-In-One, etc and the internal linking, etc) I managed to move up quite a bit without building those external links.
Now I move on to that step in the process. This is VERY exciting. I’m already well ahead of my goals and feel like I’ve not even really started yet.
Patch that’s great – if you’re already there without the links you’re going to be in amazing shape when you get them!
If you have the content why wouldn’t you create a bunch of pages that rank or at least have the potential to rank?
Hey Chris! You would as long as you took the time to make sure each page ranked. People don’t do this and that’s how they end up with sites that have 150 posts and get 30 visitors per day. You could get more traffic by making sure that one of those posts ranked #1 for a decent keyword.
After you have one ranked #1, you can choose another and do the same. You then do another and another.
If you have that much content a lot of it should be used offsite to promote properly. If you have enough content to put up tons of posts and also promote offsite, then that would obviously be even better.
Hi Court
I know we hav been advice to go for niche product or niche search keywords but how about a situation where our core business is in very competitive market n we really need to target the same keyword as the top ranking site. Assuming we are willing to work hard on and off page optimisation, what would be the best strategy here…example the car industry. Most sites hav general car domain, car make subpages n model of each car make as further subpages. Do we do the same n work hard on getting more quality backlinks or..
1. Make sites of each model of whatever make of the car n link them as a network.
2. Make sites of each make of car n hav subpages of their respective models n link them as a networt.
3. Forget the whole idea n just go for niche keyword search where little sales is better than not at all.
sorry for the long question n thks for sharing your knowledge
If you can get really good at creating one, then it gets easier to create many, it’s all about the keywords and the competition on page 1. Make friends with those long tails!!
Thanks for the response Court. I’m kind of new at this I run a distribution company for print and promotional products but those terms are way too broad to generate convertible traffic, lately we’ve been focusing on building very specific pages for products people actually search for. We use a platform called Hubspot that gives me a lot of data about keywords how many searches there are how difficult they are to rank for etc.
We are trying to create a situation where if someone searches a keyword like, document folders they land on a page that focuses only on document folders.
We are ranking for a number of words right now the problem is those words have very few searches we are trying to increase our rank for terms that get decent search volume but also have a decent likely hood of responding to a call for action once they get there.