Need Strategies For A Very Difficult Keyword

by honed
8 replies
  • SEO
  • |
I'm dealing with a fairly competitive keyword, it's not "auto insurance" tough, but seriously competitive.

So far, I've used a few services and those helped but nowhere near what they had done for other projects. I'm building links daily myself and keeping the link velocity constant, but not overdoing it.

In the past 6 weeks I have varied the types of links, used article marketing, press releases, article wheels, pyramids and got to 30th. I have been bouncing hard the lat 3 days and I am at 190th, after being 1000+ the previous days before. As I said, bouncing a lot.

I'm just building, building and more building but wondered if any of you would share your thoughts and ideas for ranking in a very difficult keyword.
#difficult #keyword #strategies
  • Profile picture of the author RealEcon
    If youre at #30 just sign up to a high PR homepage backlinks network. It will probably take you the rest of the way to the 1st page for under $50 a month.
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  • Profile picture of the author honed
    I *was* at 30, but I'm at 190 now. I have been building non-stop, so bouncing non-stop for a while.

    I could hand it off, but I want to see if I can get it done being more 'hands on'.
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  • Profile picture of the author bermuda
    I can guess that your website is still not one year old and such ranking fluctuations and ups and downs seem to be natural, especially as you have mentioned about your main keyword to be too hot and competitive. Your competitors, talking about older and truly established ones, have been working on their sites for months and even years, adding thousands of links and they have got older in the course of time as well.

    The fact is that in such cases, even if you make use of the best links coming from high PR and closely related portals, but there are no definitive shortcuts to pick and you are advised to remain patient because SEO is the art or practicing patience, working on link building plans and adding contents to websites for weeks and months and gradually the finer ranks would be gained and fixed in their positions.
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  • Profile picture of the author honed
    It's 6 years old and the fluctuations are greater and longer lasting than I am used to. Maybe due to the competitive nature of the keyword?

    I am kind of being patient, but with the efforts I have done, I'd expect to be much higher on the rankings than I am. I use SB and have a huge list that I post links to manually, in addition to outsourceing a variety of links, I'm just looking to know what strategies warriors have used in similar situations.
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  • You are wasting your time.

    Look at the top 3 placements. Can you outrank them?

    Probably not. That's reality.

    So dig... dig dig. Go for the really long tail keywords and stay on theme.

    I have a site that gets thousands of visitors and almost none of them through the home page and all most all of them from long tail keywords... 100's of related long tail keywords.

    As a result over the past 10 years I have managed to get in the top 10 for dozens and dozens of those keywords and of course some number one listings for some of the long trail phrases.

    Once you get them in the door regardless of page if you have good navigation they can look around and find more related content.

    Focus on Branding your site and making it "stick" in the minds of the users in your niche. When you do that over time they will build the links for you.
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  • Profile picture of the author Abruzzo Villas
    Originally Posted by honed View Post

    In the past 6 weeks I have varied the types of links, used article marketing,
    From what i understand, Google's new algorithm has downgraded article marketing websites so im not so sure how effective your backlinks on article marketing websites are these days - perhaps someone can elaborate on that?
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  • Profile picture of the author honed
    I read that too on the AM, so I use it sparingly and schedule them out on this site, also using a few hundred of the highest PR sites too. I could blast 3000 sites, but many are 0PR and really spammy.

    @Internet Marketing IQ - You are right on the long tail, that is what I am working on and ranking well on a few of those, but they are low volume ~3k-5k/month vs 130k for the main keyword. I'm not sure about the top placement, but the top at the moment is a review site and the 2nd is a university. The next 3-4 are competitors.
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  • Profile picture of the author honed
    A followup:

    I'm on page 2 now and steady. I can go into the Google dance, but it settles faster now, 2 days or so and it seems now that it holds in place stronger each time it bounces.
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