My 1000th post: how I got my EMD to page one with almost no backlinks, Google caches me in seconds!

Surely not, my 1000th post already - I spend WAY too much time on here!

Anyway, WF has helped me a lot, and the SEO forum has some great knowledge shared on it (if you can cut through the large amount of nonsense and contradictions you hear, ha!). So I want to give you a little case study for a site I launched back at the beginning of January so you can see a different way to doing SEO and ranking your sites - it's nothing new or revolutionary, and some won't like it, but, well, it works for me, so take it or leave it!

How I started
I registered the .org for an EMD relating to a niche sports product.

Let's call it hockeyboots.org (it's NOT!) - the .net and .com were both taken unfortunately, and both on page one, one autogenerated, one very thin on content. The rest of the competition was an eHow (barrghhhh) a forum post, an Amazon page and a retailer product info page ranking no.1 (good content). Only about 2900 global exact searches, but hear me out - that does NOT ALWAYS MATTER! GKWT says 22,000 broad matches globally and the niche has a huge number of product-related keywords - a lot more than 22,000 searches, I bet. The CPC is only about $0.60 but that doesn't matter as I plan to monetize with affiliate products that fetch much more than that - Amazon, eBay etc. and I will be going for high volume in any case.


What happened
After 6 months I now rank no. 4 for the main EMD keywords, having overtaken the .com (it expired! I am trying to acquire it), the Amazon and the eHow (in your face!!!). Yes, you CAN still rank on page one with an EMD with no backlinks. The no. 2 is easily within reach, no. 1 might be a BIT more tricky, but no problem, because I am pushing around 50 Google searches per day for this "new" site, almost all for an amazing array of long-tail keywords, plus my main EMD keywords, and this is growing almost exponentially by the day. Any new post that I add gets instantly crawled, cached and indexed by Google, and starts ranking straight away for different related long-tails. And I achieved this with almost no backlinking except a couple of forum profiles/sigs in related forums I am active in and REAL comments on related blogs (about 3 comments!).

So how did I do it?
Well, some people are going to hate this but...


Hear me out - we are not talking an encyclopaedia here - this is 'just' a microniche, I only wrote about 4 longer articles (static Wordpress pages) in the space of 6 months, occasionally updating the content of some of them along the way. However, these are killer articles. The plan was always for them to be the best articles on the subject anywhere on the net. I happen to know a bit about "hockey boots" because I play "hockey" (not the real niche!), but I still had to do a bit of research, and you can too, though a topic you are interested in is always better. My articles explain hockey boots better than ANY site out there (I know this for a fact!) and basically consist of something like:

• what are hockeyboots and what is special about them
• what are the different types
• which boots are for grass and which for hard surfaces/what kind of studs do they have
• how to choose hockey boots (criteria)

Again, hockey boots is just an example! But this is not rocket science, these are simple, but very well researched articles over 1000 words that answer questions people will have about hockey boots when they are just starting, with images too. And I wrote them slowly, when I had time, over a 5-6-month period. Used a VERY basic, plain white framework theme, almost no plugins. And just watched it creep-creep up the rankings, right through all the Panda updates. Oh, and NO affiliate links or ads until I was on page one! I am still not earning from the site because I am not in a hurry, and most of the search traffic is hitting the earliest, informative articles I wrote - my search-engine bait, if you like. I am not patient generally, but this suits my style of picking things up every now and then when I feel like it. I have only just started writing product posts recently, just one or two a week, when I find time, and like I said, they are all getting instantly indexed and appearing in the SERPS for related buying terms.

In other words, I made an authority site in a nice, smaller niche with manageable competition. The ONLY authority site in the niche!

Isn't that where we all want to be?

I now know that any post I write on a related product will rank for product-type searches that convert well and I now have a massive earnings potential there to be built on.


You can do this
Now, you hate writing "quality content", right? It's much easier writing/outsourcing a $2 article and thrashing it with backlinks to get the same result. Well, it might be for you, and I am still tempted to do that sometimes. But what is easier, writing 4 GOOD articles on an interesting subject over a period of a few months (or paying $20 each for them), or messing around with the usual tedious backlinking techniques, many of them little more than spam? I know which I'd rather do, because the latter approach may get individual pages to no. 1 for a limited range of keywords. But the former approach gets my site authority, which is incredibly powerful once you have it and gets me ranking for shedloads of keywords. Sure, 6 months is a long time, but you think I wasn't doing other stuff over that time?!

So why not consider this approach the next site you build? Here's my "formula" for EMD ranking success, if you like:

• pick a good, general product-type niche like equipment for a specific sport, toys for a specific age-group, a particular type of gardening equipment, whatever
• decide on the exact keywords - do the usual Google Keyword Tool research to check for search volume, but also look into broad matches to see how wide a niche it is.
• do all the usual due diligence, make sure page one isn't dominated by high-power, aged, authority pages that are well-optimised for the keywords, though I do not think that is the most important thing. You can beat even those, but it might not even be necessary.
• think about how you would monetize - are there high-paying Adsense clicks to be had, product affiliate programs (Amazon etc.), info products on Clickbank?
• try to get the exact match domain if possible, but that's just a bonus, your content will get you there in the end anyway. EMDs are necessary if you want to get CRAP to page one, you must have realized that by now
• set up a Wordpress blog with the simplest theme you can find, so you can change it later when your site has taken shape. Install the usual basic plugins - sitemaps, All-in-one-SEO - no secrets here. I put SEO Search terms on too, but turned off the "search links" option when I realized Google was indexing hundreds of pages of duplicate content and I was going to get slapped very quickly.
• Write or outsource a fantastic general article on your subject of choice. It's got to be well-researched and answer the kinds of questions people ask about the subject, or the kinds of questions YOU had when you were getting into hockey or whatever - look around the forums, Yahoo Answers etc. to get ideas. Call it About hockey boots or something and stick it to the (static) front page. Don't worry about keyword density and all that - it will happen naturally.
• Gradually work on another few articles closely related to the main topic as I described above in my hockey boots example. You can make them child pages of the main page. That way you will get a nice hierarchy going. Actually, I started a couple of top-level pages - the second was tangentially related to hockey boots like, "hockey boot studs" and had a child page about specific types of hockey boot stud (generally, though you can mention a few models with a view to internally linking later). You can do this to gradually branch out your site and later you can internally link from these "master" pages to your product pages etc.
• DON'T be tempted to monetize out of the gate. It's not that Google will "penalize" you, it's the fact that you will spend your time messing around with ad placements instead of focusing on what matters - the content. WAIT till you have some decent traffic and you are actually writing about specific products
• Sign up for a few related forums and put your site in the sig - guess what, NO-ONE will "ban" you because there is no obvious commercial intent on your site, it's just an informative, hobby site. You can even put something like "Here is my blog about hockey boots, why not leave a comment and let me know if I missed any info out?" etc.
• your site should gradually start creeping up the rankings for your main keywords and you will quickly start getting long-tail, "problem-solving/question-asking" traffic to it too.
• once you are on page one for the main terms, or you are getting a good volume of traffic, like a couple of dozen Google hits a day, at least, you can think about starting to write some posts. I planned out the categories carefully by Brand -> range -> type -> model, e.g. "Nike -> Super-Sport -> Men's" and then under Men's I am eventually going to review or write overviews of all the men's models. And then I start writing simple posts (we turn off the static front page now and show posts on page one), first one for the main Nike category (who are Nike, overall info about their hockey boot range etc.), then one for the next one down, the Super-Sport range - what is specific about it, which models are in the range etc. There is NO rule about how often you must do this. I just schedule them out evenly though as I don't want to get into having to write posts every day just to keep the Google monster happy! But it's happy anyway, because guess what, I have three pages ranking 1, 2 and 3 almost overnight for, say, "Nike men's hockey boots"! No, it's not the highest volume search term, but it has masses of long-tail related terms and it's all adding up very quickly!
• I can start thinking about putting some affiliate links in now - no need to stuff them everywhere. I use my own Wordbay eBay plugin, or you can use something similar to insert say 4-6 product listings, or even just text links here and there in the text, though a plugin is nice because it gives them a picture to click on.
• Eventually I get down to writing about individual boot models, and Google eats them up, and so do the searchers, and that it where I start seeing sales. And there are literally hundreds of hockey boot models, so I am not going to run out soon. Once things are going I can outsource this stuff easily.

And that's basically how you get a microniche EMD seeing some proper traffic - don't agonise over keywords, keyword density, what plugins to use, etc. etc. And don't write shoddy keyword-stuffed fluff articles and then start hurling backlinks at it and spending all your time on forums asking "Is my site sandboxed?" and "Do nofollow links count?". If you want to rank no. 1 for "garden gate hinges" just write the best 4 or 5 darn' articles anyone ever has on garden gate hinges and you bet you are going to be ranking page one before you know it with none of that mindnumbing backlinking!

OK, that's it from me, I will answer any questions but remember, there is NO "secret" to this, just go and DO IT and see the results!