Surely I'm Doing Something Wrong?

14 years ago

You don't mention anything about your initial keyword research?

Your keyword research is the most important part of the game in my eyes.. if you pick an ultra competitive keyword and are competing against sites that are aged and have lots of links then it will take too much time and effort to rank for the terms in the search engines.

You should be looking at search terms that have under 100k competition in phrase match and competition that is not huge in terms of the sites in the top 20 of the serps. You should always have a main phrase and some 2nd tier phrases (long tail) if possible.

if you Pm me your main keywords I don't mind having a quick look for you.

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[Link Alchemist] YOU ARE WASTING 80% Of Your SEO Efforts.. And you don't realise it!!!!

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Rysk 14 years ago

That's 100,000 monthly search volume from Google AdWords tool?
Global or country specific?
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James Foster

14 years ago

I think he meant 100k competing pages.

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Glassjaw009

14 years ago

I Agree with Traffic Mystic. If you're going to for they keyword "debt" or something like that, you're going to have a hard time ranking. To answer your original question, it looks like you're doing pretty much everything right. You must be in an ultra competitive niche. Hope this helps.

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Spatch Merlin

14 years ago

Hi Martin,

Whether you're doing something wrong or not depends on how you're trying to make money. If you're trying to sell either your own products or affiliate products, what you're doing wrong is chasing SE rankings in the first place. What you should be doing is building your list and marketing to it. If on the other hand you are providing online information and first class content as the search engines love you to do, for their own benefit and you are using all 'white hat' methods you're slow progress is a mystery. If they have found out that you're using the methods you mention in your post there's a chance that you've wound up in the sandbox!

I wish I could be more positive and write nicer things but the truth is going to save you a lot of time and heart ache.

Consider this:

Few people buy on a first visit to an unknown site, we must build trust in the first instance and then people will buy from us and not before. When they know that we are to be trusted to give good value and know what we're talking about they will buy from us again and again.

BUILD YOUR LIST, little else works or matters!

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Rysk

14 years ago

''I think he meant 100k competing page''

I'm a newbie, how do you accurately determine the no of competing sites for your chosen keyword.

I guess its the keyword in the title tag, but how do you determine this?
What operator do you use on Google?

Thanks

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TrafficMystic

14 years ago

Yes... it's the competing sites not the search volume.

The most basic way is to goto google and put your search term/s in double quotes

ie.. "nintendo wii games"

If you do it broad match it would be without the quotes

ie.. nintendo wii games

regards

Steve

Originally Posted by Rysk

''I think he meant 100k competing page''

I'm a newbie, how do you accurately determine the no of competing sites for your chosen keyword.

I guess its the keyword in the title tag, but how do you determine this?
What operator do you use on Google?

Thanks

Thanks
1 reply

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[Link Alchemist] YOU ARE WASTING 80% Of Your SEO Efforts.. And you don't realise it!!!!

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Martin N Smith

14 years ago

Originally Posted by TrafficMystic

Yes... it's the competing sites not the search volume.

The most basic way is to goto google and put your search term/s in double quotes

ie.. "nintendo wii games"

If you do it broad match it would be without the quotes

ie.. nintendo wii games

regards

Steve

Steve,

Why not use "allintitle: keyword" - Does this not give us a better idea of the number of competing sites?

Thanks (again!)
M

Thanks

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Martin N Smith 14 years ago

[QUOTE=Spatch Merlin;1528944]Hi Martin,

Whether you're doing something wrong or not depends on how you're trying to make money. If you're trying to sell either your own products or affiliate products, what you're doing wrong is chasing SE rankings in the first place. What you should be doing is building your list and marketing to it. If on the other hand you are providing online information and first class content as the search engines love you to do, for their own benefit and you are using all 'white hat' methods you're slow progress is a mystery. If they have found out that you're using the methods you mention in your post there's a chance that you've wound up in the sandbox!

Thanks Spatch Merlin, this is great stuff. I am curious though, are you suggesting that some of my on-site activities are not entirely 'white hat'?

Martin
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- Martin N Smith 14 years ago
  
  Thanks for all your input guys, it's much appreciated.
  
  In answer to your questions:-
  
  * I'm not selling ebooks, affiliate products etc. I have a site that produces news, features and blogs (we also have a forum). So I very much AM in the market for search traffic
  
  * I do have about 10 keywords i'm targeting and I HAVE done the keyword research. However (and this may be an issue), I have applied the following method of choosing my keywords:-
  
  1. Identify a keyword phase that may be worth going after (usually long tail).
  
  2. Find the number of EXACT local searches per month using the Google Adwords keyword tool.
  
  3. Find the number of local competing pages using the "allintitle: keyword" search in Google.
  
  4. Divide the total number of searches by the total number of 'competitors' to come up with what I call a 'simple ratio'.
  
  5. Once I have (say) 30 keywords, i'll then do a quick search on the Front page of google to see which sites are ranking highly for each keyword. If there are load of know authority sites on page one, I scrap the keyword and move on to the next..
  
  What do you reckon?
  
  Thanks again
  Martin
  
  Thanks
  
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bgmacaw 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Spatch Merlin

what you're doing wrong is chasing SE rankings in the first place. What you should be doing is building your list and marketing to it.

List building is one type of online business but it isn't the only one. Some people just don't feel comfortable spamming the crap out of a list with the latest CPA or JV offers (which is what most list builders do and I have a junk email box filled to the brim that proves this) while others don't have a problem with it.
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risahe

14 years ago

if the competitiveness is too big, I think it is very hard to see the effect

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chen

14 years ago

what is back linking?

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TrafficMystic

14 years ago

Martin, I've looked at the keywords and send back some stats on them and screen shots... They arnt keywords i would target (competition to high and high rank auth domains with 10's of thousands of link backs). I've also send a list of possible keywords that you would want to look at and they will get you rankings and traffic using the strategies your currently using.

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Martin N Smith

14 years ago

Originally Posted by TrafficMystic

Martin, I've looked at the keywords and send back some stats on them and screen shots... They arnt keywords i would target (competition to high and high rank auth domains with 10's of thousands of link backs). I've also send a list of possible keywords that you would want to look at and they will get you rankings and traffic using the strategies your currently using.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for taking the time to look at my keywords. It's kind gesture and I'll really appreciate it.

Like I said in my email, I am curious about the results your s/w was throwing out. In particular, the number of "Searches" column is widely different to the numbers from the Google Keyword Tool.

FYI - i'm using the EXACT number of LOCAL searches for each KW I sent you.

Also, what does SEO Traffic (SEOT) and Phase to Broad (PBR) mean?

Thanks again
Martin

Thanks

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HomeComputerGames

14 years ago

Have you looked for any type of errors with your site?
Several times in just the past couple of weeks when someone posted something like this it was found there was a faulty robots.txt file or robots meta blocking Google access.
Boy did they feel foolish

You have insured that all is ok on the home-front first?

Thanks

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yes, I am....

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Beldin

14 years ago

Along the lines of something site-specific that could cause an issue... if this is a Wordpress site (sorry if I missed that information), is the privacy set to allow the search engines in?

Beldin

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