Glowleaf

A year ago, after a lot of research, I decided to go for a very competitive niche.

(I will not say what that niche is, but smart people will find out anyway)

The niche is a standard business avenue, unlike the classic affiliate marketing world.

The keyphrases I went for were 2, a main and a secondary one.

The main keyphrase had 80.000 results in Google, hardly a competetive number for other niches like poker or credit.

The secondary keyphrase had 220.000 results in Google, a better match.

Obviously, the secondary had more searches than the primary, so why did I choose it the other way around?

Well, the answer was that while the secondary had more searches (and competition), it was a wider interpretation of the business, whereas the primary is spot on the theme. Also, in the primary, the other sites where actually my competitors, where in the secondary, it was them and lots of relevant businesses, but not actually the competition. I hope that made sense.

Then, I researched many of the competitive sites, and I laughed a lot while doing so. The 90% of them was horrible, and the remaining 10% was too basic, and most of that 10% had seo from 1995.

Examining the top 20, and their backlinks, I saw something ugly. These guys had stuffed keywords in metatags, backlinks from every relevant directory out there, DMOZ links, Yahoo directory links, PR6 links from irrelevant sites that had not been updated since 1996 (yes, I am serious). The top 15 where on-site seo’d to shit, with almost every page indexed, in both yahoo and msn.

And the cherry on top was the domain age. Every domain was from 1997-2001 tops, and every site has been in the index with closely the same content ever since its registration.

Not a good landscape to dive into. Actually, for the past 3 months, the only thing keeping me from outranking them is domain age, and their backlinks age.

Right now, I am close to Google spot 26, and the site keeps on ranking as Google lifts the filters from my links. How did I do that? Simple:

• Pure content. Many of the competitive sites where the classic brochure sites, saying a bit about the company, some pics, prices, and a few more pages. I found that they lacked in content, so I beat the shit out of my content part, and stuffed everything in. They have 200-2.000 pages, I put up 50.000.
• Links. All their links where reciprocal (which worked in the old days, but now it nullifies the “vote” from one page to another). I put on one way links. Also, I put the directory on a different domain, so any reciprocals became 3-way-links.
• Spam links. All their seo was white hat, and borderline gray hat. Don the black hat my friends, and your opposition is in deep trouble.
• Dullness. Their sites, except a few, are dull, dull, DULL. Put some web 2.0 thingies up there, and your are good to go.
• Sex. Or lack thereof. Let me say this softly: YOU CANNOT SELL ANYTHING WITHOUT SEX. I put on pictures of babes. They are going the family route. I win, they lose.
• Static sites VS pinging blogs. You know who wins.
• Adsense. Come on! Adsense on a business site? He has got a nice: “This site a scam? Find out here” ad that steals a third of his traffic. Amateurs…
• Communication. If you dont communicate with your customers, you lose. Put in blogs, skype, email addresses everywhere, phone numbers, contact forms, forum, comment, etc.
• Imagination. They lack imagination. I dont. Create anything you can think of that can give you a competitive advantage. Find what they dont have, and put it up first.

EDIT: I got asked what I mean by keyphrase.

When you say keyphrase instead of keywords, you mean like a long english sentence that has the keyword in it? can you give some examples?

A keyphrase is a phrase that contains a few keywords you want to rank for. Something like the longtail, but not exactly. An example : “Glowleaf affiliate marketing blog, out of the box thinking for making money online”

You spoke in the last post about beating the competition with, among others, pure content.
They put 2000 pages, you put up 50,000. How did you put those up? I mean it must be generated, but then the content quality isn’t there so much? Or did I miss something?

About content, you can autogenerate pages, interlink them, and put up links. Check this out:
http://www.cashquests.com/google-pag…eat-the-system

Also, eli at blue hat seo says that internal linking to the upper pages push up rankings as well. I could not find the article on a quick glance. You should read his whole blog anyway!

So, I just combined the two ideas.

Once you put up those pages, all you have to do is try and index them. Then your ranks will go up. Also, always monetize the autogenerated pages with ppc (not adsense, try adbrite, or better yet, peakclick).

What I have been wondering about is how to facilitate the most time consuming part of the work: content.

Could you tell me more about generating those pages. I mean generated pages that are, i guess, good enough in terms of english to get people to go on them and click on ads.

I heard of some generators using dictionaries, but it’s most for bots, not so much for humans.

I like rssevolution. You have to buy it, but you can use a demo for a few days to see what it does. A free alternative is yacg.