Can't Stop Spinning My Wheels!

SEO will increasingly become more difficult, particularly with so many new marketers attempting to seek out long-tail keywords. You can still find keywords ripe for the picking, but I personally don't find it to be a productive use of time.

When I'm looking to create an authority site that is designed to stick around for years, I pick domain names with branding potential rather than exact-match keywords for two reasons:

1. Exact match keyword domains often look spammy and don't linger on the visitor's brain as much as brandable keywords. Which would you prefer? Dogster.com (a real authority site), which rolls off the tongue? Or something generic like how-to-potty-train-a-puppy.com?

2. Using the above two examples, let's say your site experiences significant traffic. You've found a niche that caught on fire. If you selected the latter, you've largely limited your expansion potential. No one's going to expect to see dog breed info, dog training info, etc. on a potty training site, whereas a brandable general name like Dogster can expand into any topic involving canines.

I've used exact keyword URLs plenty of times before, but only as quick buck attempts. If you're looking to build a quality site, I think flexibility and brandability far outweigh any minor perceived SEO benefit to exact match URLs.

As far as keyword selection goes for articles, SEO is indeed an important factor, but when I'm building a new site I write for the visitor, not the search engine. Many of my articles aren't even written with a specific keyword in mind; I just take pen to paper and answer a visitor's question or concern.

Sacrilege, right? Not really. Over time I do receive significant quantities of SE visitors even from non-keyword targeted articles; you would be surprised how many visitors arrive via unique keyword combinations that no webmaster could predict. And perhaps more importantly, I receive traffic to those articles via word of mouth referrals, unrequested linkbacks to my sites, and publication in offline magazines. I can't tell you how many offline publishers have written me requesting permission to use one of my articles in their magazines, which provides me massive levels of free online and offline exposure for my businesses.

The SEO game is too much like a hamster wheel for me. I don't want to race after others begging for links, exposure, etc. I'd much rather make a site so appealing to visitors that people pursue me. Everything else falls into place, including SE rankings! Those aforementioned free links back to my pages I mentioned? They have given me top rankings on very competitive keywords without requiring much effort.

I do include a selection of long-tail keywords even with authority sites and I do build with SEO in mind, so I don't want to dismiss the value of doing such research. But my first and primary focus is to get quality content out there, keyword-selection or competitiveness be damned. I'm not looking to create sites that exploit openings... I'm looking to create sites that directly challenge other authority sites in the industry.

It's a slower process than chasing exact keyword URLs, but with patience everything usually falls into place without all the gnashing of teeth that SEO experts suffer. I don't even pay attention to Google algorithm changes all that much, because once a site digs in deep and has enough pages out there, algorithm changes really don't affect traffic significantly. It's the smaller, lesser keyword-exploiting sites that are most susceptible.

Were I in your shoes, I'd just slap a site up and start building; at least you'll have a chance to get some momentum unlike the wheel-spinning caused by endless keyword research. See if you detect any previously unknown keyword combos that the Adwords keyword tool failed to pick up (it's not perfectly accurate). See if your market is hungry for a particular corner of your niche. And if your site fails to rank? Try again with with another site in the same genre using the lessons you've learned. Or work on more than one site at a time to increase your chances of one catching fire.

It can take some time and patience, but it honestly is almost impossible not to make money if you just keep banging out quality pages... even if you're not paying SEO any heed whatsoever.

Jeffrey

Well, I'd advise you not to limit yourself to one market as long as you can do so without spreading yourself too thin.

PR and domain age aren't as big a factor as you may think, when it comes to ranking The amount and quality of content, and the amount, quality and variety of backlinks are more important. Having good on page optimization is important too.