EzSEO Newsletter # 80
June 5, 2005 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 80
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. How much traffic? … And how to get it?
2. Trouble getting links?
3. Linkmachine – again
4. Other Stuff
Hi again
This week, the tragic death of Internet Marketing legend Corey Rudl (aged 34) has been big news. It certainly puts things into perspective when things like this happen. Corey was a pioneer in the field, and all of us who make our livings in Affiliate Marketing owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
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1. How much traffic? … And how to get it?
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How many daily visitors would you like to your site?
I ask this question quite a lot, and do you know what? Most people don’t have an answer. I usually get answers along the lines of
“Oh, I’m not sure, what do you think is a good number”.
I really believe this is an important question to ask yourself when planning a new site. Only by having a clear figure in mind can we begin to plan our strategy.
Let’s take 1000 unique visitors a day as an example. How would you go about getting that many visitors?
Here is one way to do it:
1. Find a keyword that gets 1000+ searches a day.
2. Create a web page optimized for that keyword.
3. Work very hard to get links pointing to that page so that it gets a good enough PR and link reputation to make it rank #1.
This can work, but it is quite a risky strategy. It is impossible to guarantee top rankings for any one keyword phrase, and then what happens if that page gets penalised, or starts to drop in rankings? It is a huge investment of time and energy on a single web page.
Here is another way you could do it:
1. Find 10 keywords that get 100+ searches a day.
2. Create a web page for each of these 10 phrases.
3. Work quite hard at getting enough links pointing to each of these pages to ensure that they all rank #1.
Now this strategy is similar to the first. The one big difference is the keywords you choose.
In the first example, any keyword that gets 1000 searches a day will likely have a very high number of competing sites trying to capture traffic for that phrase.
High competition, means more work for you to get your pages to rank well.
In the second example, the 10 keywords have fewer searches per day, and are likely to have less competition (although it does depend on how good you are at keyword research). This means less work for you to get those 10 pages ranking well. The added bonus to the second strategy is that if one page drops in the rankings, you have 9 others to help balance the risk.
Generally, the fewer searches a keyword has, the less competition.
Here is an example:
hemorrhoids – 555 daily searches at Google, 758,000 competing pages in Google
hemorrhoid – 146 daily searches at Google, 200,000 competing pages in Google
“hemorrhoid treatment” – 67 daily searches at Google, 25,500 competing pages in Google
Do you see how the competition falls as the number of daily searches falls? This is common sense, because high search phrases make more money than low search phrases, so more webmasters are targeting them, leading to higher competition. There are obviously a lot of exceptions, but you do see this correlation in a lot of keyword sets.
How can you use this information?
Well, here is another question for you.
How hard are you going to work at getting other sites to link to yours?
If you are going to work very hard, you can go for more competitive phrases, which means less web pages need to be created for your site.
If you want to put minimal effort into getting links to your pages, you need to target less competitive phrases, which in turn have less daily searches. This means you have to create more pages for your site.
Here is a final scenario:
1. Find 500 keywords that get 2+ searches a day (and are very low competition).
2. Create a web page for each of these 500 phrases.
3. Get a few links to your site.
This final scenario takes less work on the linking phase of your site, but obviously a lot more work on the content part of your site.
You will need fewer links from other sites, because there is less competition for your keywords.
Obvioulsy each page brings in less traffic, but that means there is no risk of losing most of your traffic if one or two pages fall in the rankings.
The other big advantage to this type of site is that large sites have more pages, so you can strategically place YOUR links on a lot more pages.
Once you have a 500 page site up and running, there is no reason why you could not start targeting high search phrases on your 500 page site, and placing a link to these “high search” pages on each of your 500 pages. That would certainly help boost their rankings, despite heavy competition from other sites. After all, these high search pages would then have 500 incoming links each.
By starting with low competition phrases, and working your way up to higher competition phrases, you can really explode your traffic, and your profits.
The big downside of large sites is if they get penalised or banned for doing something stupid (like cross-linking, hidden text, spammy content from content generators, etc). If you go the big site route, you need to make sure you keep up to date on Google’s webmaster guidleines, to make sure you don’t do anything to jepardize your site.
If a own one big site and it gets penalised, you lose your full income.
If you have 10 smaller sites and one gets penalised, its not so bad – you still have 9 others.
1000 unique visitors a day is not difficult. It does take time, but you do have options. Do you want to spend that time creating more content, or building links to your site?
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2. Trouble getting links?
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A question I was asked yesterday:
“–Why would someone with a great site want to exchange links with a newbie-looking site?”
Well, in many cases they wont. The big problem new sites have is the fact they have a PR 0. Most webmasters you approach turn their noses up at PR 0 sites as they offer nothing in return.
With PR only being updated every 3 months or so, it makes things even more difficult.
You need to get some links and wait up to 3 months before your site shows any PR at all. However, how are you going to get links without PR in the first place?
Fortunately there is an easy way to get some links, so that your site gets some PR, so that you can approach other webmasters about link exchanges.
Before we look at how, let’s just look into the crystal ball for a moment.
Imagine that you have gained 5 links pointing to your site. You wait 3 months and your site gets PR in the Google toolbar. Let’s say it is a 3.
You now think, “Great, I can get other webmasters to take me seriously”.
You set up a links page (or resources page), and put a link to it from your homepage. You upload the links page and the updated homepage.
You again contact webmasters about a link exchange.
The replies you get back are disappointing:
“Sorry, but your links page has no PR”.
Whoops. Now you have to wait another 3 months before any PR from your homepage is assigned to the links page. When you do get that PR update in 3 months, it is likely to be a tiny fraction of the PR of your homepage (since the homepage PR is divided between ALL links on the homepage).
OK, here is what to do.
In the design stages of your website, create the resource page, and link to it from EVERY page on your site. You can leave it blank, but what I prefer to do is link to the top five search results in Google (for my main keyword phrase). This gives your links page some content, so should not cause problems in getting it indexed. As you add real link partners at a later date, you can remove these links.
OK, you can now go and get the links into your site using the method I will tell you about in a minute.
Google will follow these links, find all of your pages in the course of the next few weeks, and assign PR to all of the pages according to its PR formula. Because the links page has links from all of your pages, it will receive a better PR than if you only linked to it from your homepage.
When PR on the toolbar is updated, you get a decent PR on your links page, and are in a better situation to request links from similar site.
Planning ahead is very important, and the links page needs to be there from the beginning.
OK, I told you that there was an easy way to get links to your site. Here it is:
Write articles and submit them to article submission sites.
One of the very best article sites is ezinearticles.com. Create 5 or 10 articles related to your site. Include a resource box at the foot of your article, which has an active link or two, back to your website.
Don’t just link to the homepage, link to internal pages as well.
Submit these articles to ezinearticles.com, and other article submission sites. You will be amazed at how these articles can increase your PR and link reputation.
Not only will these article sites send you traffic, but they will also help your pages rank higher.
Article submissions are very tedious, and take a lot of time, but they are worth it.
For the lazy submitters amongst us, there is hope on the horizon. I am currently testing some software that is scheduled for release at the end of this month. It speeds up the process of submitting articles to hundreds of submission sites. I am very impressed with it so far, and will certainly keep you updated on this product.
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3. Linkmachine – again
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Linkmachine is a script that helps manage your reciprocal links campaigns. I have been using it on several sites, and have been very impressed by its ease of use and features.
Michael offers a f-r-e-e version of Linkmachine, so I highly recommend you take a look at it.
Here is what I particularly like about this script.
1. Setup and forget – Once the script is setup on a site, you can largely forget about it. When someone requests a link exchange, you will be sent an email. Just login to approve or reject the partner.
2. Automated spying on your partners – Linkmachine can be setup to automatically check your partners are still linking back to you. If LinkMachine finds your link partner has removed your link (or even used the nofollow tag to invalidate that link), it can automatically send out an email to that webmaster asking for your link back, or the option I choose is to automatically have these sites removed from my links page. If a webmaster has removed my link, that makes him/her untrustworthy, so I delete them without a second chance.
3. Increasing number of users – means that more and more people are using LinkMachine’s site searching features to look for related sites. One of the options in Linkmachine is to search for other LinkMachine users in your niche, and send out emails requesting a link. This has lead to a large number of my sites acquiring links with no effort on my behalf, as other webmasters contact me – I love that!
4. The ability to check up on your partners PR – Linkmachine can search your link partners for PR 0 sites. Any site that remains PR 0 after a PR update is not a very good link partner (as it means they are not working at getting links to their site, or have been penalised – which can mean you get penalised too!). Linkmachine makes it simple to search and delete sites that don’t meet your requirements.
5. One click approve or reject – means you don’t have to spend hours maintaining and approving (or culling) partners.
There are so many great features (and more being added all the time), that I cannot mention them all here. If you need help with your linking campaign, Linkmachine may be the answer to your prayers.
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4. Other Stuff
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Is Yahoo broken?
I have been looking at a very large number of new websites, and finding that the majority are finding it difficult to get fully indexed in Yahoo. In most cases, Yahoo is only including the homepage. Theories abound – penalty, Yahoo broken, or Yahoo simply not allowing full site indexing (in an effort to get webmasters to pay for inclusion).
If you have had a new site (2 months or newer) fully indexed by Yahoo, I would love to hear from you. If you have any theories of our own, I would again love to hear from you. Together, we should be able to find out what is going on.
May Niche Blueprints?
I decided to release the Niche Blueprints at the start of the month, instead of the end. Because of this, there was no May Blueprint. I released the latest Niche Blueprints (June) yesterday to existing blueprint owners. On Monday, I will be offering any remaining blueprints to those on the Blueprint Notification list. If you want ot be notified, please sign up at the Blueprint Website.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
Have a great week!
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