So close - sitting 1/2 down page 2..

[ChristineP]

Well, I'm celebrating because I've spent countless hours in a competitive niche trying to rank my site.

2 days ago on Google.ca - I reached spot 16. I'm elated!

Even though it's google.ca - the daily searches and potential traffic are excellent (estimated that a first place site could get 1000+ clicks a day) - If I can even get on page 1 I'll be happy.

As it stands, I am now seeing daily traffic.

I've just added more content to my site, submitted more articles and am currently adding high pr backlinks (among a range of no pr & web 2.0 links).

Anyone have bright ideas on how to push this baby onto page 1?

TIA!
Christine

[Craig B]

Congratulations on moving up the "ladder." It's always exciting to see all that hard work pay off, especially when trying to rank for a competitive keyword.

Sounds like you're taking the right steps so far. You could sign up with socialadr dot com (can't post links yet) and trade social bookmarks (it's not black hat btw). Just sign up for the free service. I get plenty of social bookmarks and I have the free service. Then bookmark your home page, your other pages, and your backlinks, but don't do too many backlinks at one time because you want Google to gradually find them. Just be sure to include your domain in the bookmark for your home page.

If you haven't done this already, use Yahoo and Google Buzz.

This not only aids in ranking your site but also gets traffic.

Hope this helps!
Craig

[Cathy Shelver]

Hi Christine,

Firstly just a friendly reminder this should be on the SEO/Adsense/ppc section of the forum, but the mods will move it soon and you can carry on with your thread there.

As for your question: My only advice is have you done all the basics? If it is a Wordpress site do you have the proper plugins etc. Do you have a sitemap registered with the search engines (again very easy to do if you have Wordpress).
I do not know if it actually helps but I like to always have a privacy policy page, it is an important factor for PPC and Adsense so I just figure have it in there because Google likes it.

Other than that from my limited experience I believe that constant good content with the necessary SEO essentials, but the quality of the content is most important, and time are the most important factors.

Cathy

[jan roos]

Go to fiverr and buy a 10 or 20 .edu backlinks That should give u a boost.

Cheers

[TashaTymchuk]

Congrats, good job! Start (or continue), getting highly relevant links with high authority (PR etc.), with your keyword(s) as the anchor text, pointing to your site. Just be patient, it takes time.

Good luck

[Tom Goodwin]

Hi Christine,

As already noted, this type of thread (SEO) related is best discussed in the SEO subforum (as most of the many of the 100% SEO guys/gals don't hang out in this particular forum).

But, to answer your question, it comes down to backlinks really at this point. No doubt adding in content could potentially help a little, but in my experience at least in the relative short term (say less than 6 months) it won't really help because (1) Google doesn't really rank sites for "good" content (I'll show you all of my crappy 2-4 page sites on page 1 of Google to prove it), and (2) building good content hoping others will naturally link in won't really help in the short term, and likely will only help marginally in the long term.

So, that leaves building the backlinks yourselves. There are many options. One, that has helped me a lot lately, is Article Marketing Robot (it is a WSO). Don't let the name fool you though, because it posts to not only article directories, but there are also quite a few Wordpress article directories out there that accept content as well. When I do a single run of one article with in, I will typically get around 250 live articles with my do-follow link in it. Not too bad from one article.

Another option is doing some blog commenting, putting your keyword as your name and your site as the URL, giving you the link. also, of course, are doing some profile links, which I use a lot.


Now, these are the things that have proven to me time and again that they work, and they work repeatably. Doing stuff like bookmarking, in my experience, does not help in actual Google ranking. Neither does putting up a couple of articles on EZA, at least where you are in a semi-competitive niche.

Tom

Originally Posted by ChristineP

Well, I'm celebrating because I've spent countless hours in a competitive niche trying to rank my site.

2 days ago on Google.ca - I reached spot 16. I'm elated!

Even though it's google.ca - the daily searches and potential traffic are excellent (estimated that a first place site could get 1000+ clicks a day) - If I can even get on page 1 I'll be happy.

As it stands, I am now seeing daily traffic.

I've just added more content to my site, submitted more articles and am currently adding high pr backlinks (among a range of no pr & web 2.0 links).

Anyone have bright ideas on how to push this baby onto page 1?

TIA!
Christine

[blue_sky]

As Tom and all the others already mentioned this really should be in the SEO Section (I just wanted to make sure you really get the message *ROFL*)

Its hard to give proper advice since nobody knows what kind of things you already did...e.g.
-did you submit your articles only to the big directories or were you using a submit service (some of the submit services hardly give you results)
-did you throw in some web directory submissions
-did you do some software submission (there was a nice wso here some time ago)
etc etc etc.

Dont get too excited over a top 10 result because:

Top 1 Position gets between 50-60% of the clicks
Top 2 Position gets between 10-15% of the clicks
Top 3 Position gets between 9-10% of the clicks
Top 4 Position gets between 4-5% of the clicks

[Source Cornell University and AOL Heatmap]

[ewenmack]

Hi Christine,

My suggestions come from my experience getting #5 for a search term that shows up 91,000,000 times on Google.

The site is a Wordpress blog
Has sitemap plugin
autotagger
all in one seo
onlywire
privacy policy
contact

site has about a dozen related topics

Each entry has kephrase at beginning of title, at start of first sentence and at very end of content.

Each new entry gets bookmarked to eight bookmarking sites.

I belong to a free group were we bookmark each others content at socialadr daily.

I comment on relevant blogs using my keyprase as my name.
Use easyhyperlinks.com for making code.

Send out a press release once a week which goes to 11 freepress release sites.
Use a fiverr to submit.

Use a fiverr to turn the press release into a slideshow and PDF which are submitted to top 5 slideshare sites and top 5 document sharing sites. Same fiverr does the submitting.

That one time effort gets my press release mentioned, in quotes, 700 times by Google.

All content on website is copied and pasted from article directories and Youtube.

Doing this has resulted in me going from #10, # 8, #5 within 2 weeks.

Site has zero page rank and I'm climbing above sites with page rank 4, 5,and 6 in their url.

Just remembered, the press release has keyphrase at start of title and at start of first sentence. Also has website name in heading.

My keyphrase is in domain name and in title tag too.

Hope that gives you a plan of attack.

All the best,
Ewen

[ChristineP]

Oh hey look at that - this thread got moved to the SEO forum..

Great ideas in here..

I hadn't thought of EDU links on fiverr - I will definitely give that a go.
Also - love the press release / turn it into video idea.
I have done a couple press releases so already have template to work from.

I have a pretty decent backlinking strategy in place using manual submissions, article submission, posterous network and have a service to submit high PR links.

The press release/video ideas and edu links just might push me over the top.

Anything will help as I'm still sitting way down the ranks as far as google.com is concerned.

My site is SEO optimized, careful keyword useage, titles, url etc.. etc..

Thanks everyone!

[FredJones]

91 Million searches per month? Broad or exact?


Solid plan of attack mate !!

Originally Posted by ewenmack

Hi Christine,

My suggestions come from my experience getting #5 for a search term that shows up 91,000,000 times on Google.

[ewenmack]

Originally Posted by FredJones

91 Million searches per month? Broad or exact?


Solid plan of attack mate !!

Hi Fred,

The figure you mentioned is how many times the broad match term shows up in Google search.

All the best,
Ewen

[jhonsean]

Its worth it for your page rankings right now and i think that the high quality content of yours will be the one of the most asset that you have in your SEO techniques. Keep it up because SEO is learning and it will never stop.

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by ewenmack

Hi Fred,

The figure you mentioned is how many times the broad match term shows up in Google search.

All the best,
Ewen

So basically that number says nothing about how competitive the keyword is then (as that is not the competition) it is about as relevant as gauging your competition by how many types the letter "e" shows up in your keyword.

The only reason anyone ever quotes broad match keyword search numbers is to brag about how the rule a competitive keyword, when 99% of the time the keyword is not competitive at all.,

hmm, maybe I should target this keywrod: weight loss in 3.5 days

Google says it has about 3.5 million search results, so I guess it is pretty competitive. But, oh wait. "weight loss in 3.5 days" has only 5 exact search results. The keyword probably gets zero monthly traffic. Plus, there are zero allintitle matches.

Tom

[ewenmack]

Tom,

I was using the same method as Ross Goldberg uses.

Have you taken it up with him?

Wasn't trying to brag as you suggest.

The keyphrase in quotes has 234,000 competing results in Google.

Has a daily search count of 2,900 in top 3 search engines.

All the best,
Ewen

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

So basically that number says nothing about how competitive the keyword is then (as that is not the competition) it is about as relevant as gauging your competition by how many types the letter "e" shows up in your keyword.

The only reason anyone ever quotes broad match keyword search numbers is to brag about how the rule a competitive keyword, when 99% of the time the keyword is not competitive at all.,

hmm, maybe I should target this keywrod: weight loss in 3.5 days

Google says it has about 3.5 million search results, so I guess it is pretty competitive. But, oh wait. "weight loss in 3.5 days" has only 5 exact search results. The keyword probably gets zero monthly traffic. Plus, there are zero allintitle matches.

Tom

[Tom Goodwin]

Ross Goldberg didn't post your comment, you did, so I have nothing to take up with him. (nor do I even know who is and nor do I care). Clearly stating the 90M number was to say "hey, look, I head a really competitive keyword and got it to rank page 1 with these tactics...", but you can't use the 90M number like that because it means squat.

Gurus like to use these big inflated numbers to impress newbies and others who are gullible with their hyped product. Saying something that actually might matter, like it has an allintitile search volume of 50k, isn't want they want. They want to boast some number of "competitors" in the millions, which is BS.

It is also a fact that people typically throw out these crazy search numbers to try and impress gullible newbies.

It just makes absolutely no sense to mention a keyword's search number as an indication of its competitiveness. A 200 million search result listing could be super easy, and a 2000 search result would be very difficult.

Tom

Originally Posted by ewenmack

Tom,

I was using the same method as Ross Goldberg uses.

Have you taken it up with him?

Wasn't trying to brag as you suggest.

The keyphrase in quotes has 234,000 competing results in Google.

Has a daily search count of 2,900 in top 3 search engines.

All the best,
Ewen

[ewenmack]

Point taken Tom.

As I said before, that is how I have seen others do it and I did it that way.

Not to impress or BS people.

So should I be saying the "keyphrase as shown in quotes" then?

If I can have a straight answer, without the rant, I am happy to adjust now and in the future.

All the best,
Ewen

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Ross Goldberg didn't post your comment, you did, so I have nothing to take up with him. (nor do I even know who is and nor do I care). Clearly stating the 90M number was to say "hey, look, I head a really competitive keyword and got it to rank page 1 with these tactics...", but you can't use the 90M number like that because it means squat.

Gurus like to use these big inflated numbers to impress newbies and others who are gullible with their hyped product. Saying something that actually might matter, like it has an allintitile search volume of 50k, isn't want they want. They want to boast some number of "competitors" in the millions, which is BS.

It is also a fact that people typically throw out these crazy search numbers to try and impress gullible newbies.

It just makes absolutely no sense to mention a keyword's search number as an indication of its competitiveness. A 200 million search result listing could be super easy, and a 2000 search result would be very difficult.

Tom

[ChristineP]

Ok now now... back on track here.. I've got some great advice I can use..

thanks again everyone!

[Tom Goodwin]

keyword shown in quotes is only slightly better.

Just think about it logically. When you do keyword research, how do you access competition for the keyword? I hope by stuff like having the quoted keyword in the title and/or URL. Those are the pages that are really targeting the keyword, not the sites with the keyword in quotes even.

P.S. note that the sort of rant is because you were called out for this calculation on this forum already earlier this week (by Mike Anthony and, I believe, Yukon). See: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/271345-zero-8-70-000-000-competitors-2-months.html

Tom

Originally Posted by ewenmack

Point taken Tom.

As I said before, that is how I have seen others do it and I did it that way.

Not to impress or BS people.

So should I be saying the "keyphrase as shown in quotes" then?

If I can have a straight answer, without the rant, I am happy to adjust now and in the future.

All the best,
Ewen

[dv8domainsDotCom]

I think his backlinking/PR distribution methodology is still sound, regardless of misguided presentation of competition, for whatever reason. As you pointed out, sites that show up IN the SERPs do not necessarily represent competition; they are happenstance sites that show up for the same search you happen to be targeting.

This is like winning a "race" with the person who happens to be walking on the same sidewalk as you are; they didn't even know there was a race to begin with!

Way I see it, your only competition is yourself, and the top 10 sites in SERP's for your phrase. Beat just ONE of them and you begin to win. Start to beat more, you win more. The rest of the 3 billion or whatever were just walking on your sidewalk. If you win easy then maybe it wasn't competitive anyway, but it doesn't mean you didn't win (just like beating that guy in the sidewalk race).

[ChristineP]

Hi everyone - I am just popping back in for an update...

When I first posted, I was looking to rank just for google.ca - well, it seems my SEO had paid off as not too long after this post I landed spot #10 on google.com.

One of the things I then did was start to source .edu backlinks (myself). Just today, I see a couple links I created were indexed and I'm now sitting #7th for google.com.

It's a great feeling - traffic is starting to increase as are sales.

I expect if I keep implementing more of the ideas in this thread I can achieve one of the top 4 spots.

Thanks!
Christine