This is Part #2 of a series. A list of all the other updates can be found at the bottom of this post.
When I first introduced this authority site, I made a big fuss about how it was going to be an experiment in white hat SEO. Well, as I pointed out in my October 2011 income report, that experiment has ended.
I am now approaching this site with my usual aim of producing highly-optimized content complimented by top-notch onsite SEO, combined with a tried and tested link building strategy (i.e. the one that got me to #1 in Google for my first niche site).
Keyword Research & Content Creation
As I would always recommend with authority sites, I am targeting a few highly trafficked keywords. I have no ambitions to rank for them in the near future, but I do bear them in mind when I am producing content. What is far more important in the short term is the long tail keywords I can hopefully rank for without too much effort.
When I first picked this niche, I quickly found that there were an enormous list of related keywords that could be used for individual articles. A lot of them only produced a handful of searches per day, but they would soon add up. And for many of the keywords, the competition amongst the top 10 is very low indeed.
So I got to writing an article for each long tail keyword – I have published 20 posts so far. I will continue to write articles until the available keywords have dried up, but this will take me some time!
My approach here is markedly different from that of my first niche site. For that site, I simply wrote articles about the niche, without giving a second’s thought to long tail keywords. I ended up inadvertently ranking for many long tail keywords, but I have no doubt that I would have fared much better had I been more deliberate with my content creation. I am not making the same mistake again.
Additionally, this niche seems to offer up far more opportunities for article writing. In terms of multiple long tail trafficked search queries, the child model niche doesn’t offer a great deal. That is not the case with anxiety and panic attacks – there are a lot of different topics you can write about whilst also targeting specific long tail keywords.
Backlinking
My backlinking strategy, for the time being at least, is going to be very simple.
I am going to use BuildMyRank (not an affiliate link – why?) to drip-feed backlinks to my site, at a rate of 1-3 links per day. Each article I write for BuildMyRank will be on a site with a homepage PageRank of between 2-5 (typically) that is hosted on its own unique IP address. But that’s not all – BuildMyRank submits each article to various RSS feed aggregators and social bookmarking sites, so I should end up with indexed pages that feed quite a bit of link juice through to my site.
Given that my first niche site was slapped out of the rankings by Google because of my overenthusiastic backlinking campaign, I am being very careful with my anchor text this time around. I have a list of 15 different anchor texts (that target a mixture of various articles as well as the homepage) that I draw from, and I also throw in “click here” and other such random anchor texts. This should look far less obvious to Google than me hammering away with the same 2-3 keywords on a daily basis, as I was before.
The site is only indexed in Google for just over half of the keywords I am currently targeting. I expect this to change quite quickly as I build backlinks with relevant anchor text.
That is all I will do for now! Because I am targeting keywords that are not particularly competitive, I am hoping that I can get positive results just by using BuildMyRank.
Monetization
This is an easy one – the site is not currently monetized. Why not? Because monetizing the site at this point would be of no benefit to me. There is barely any traffic flowing to the site, so it will do me no harm at all to wait until I have traffic before implementing AdSense or any other monetization method. I would rather spend more time on content creation and backlinking at this time.
Some people fool themselves into thinking that implementing AdSense on their site will mean that the money starts flowing, but that is not the case. Worry about building up a decent level of traffic first, then concern yourself with monetization.
Progress So Far
I am currently ranked above 100 in Google for 5 different keywords:
A web 2.0 site that I created a few weeks back is actually ranking for one of these keywords at the moment – I hope that my main site will overtake it in time.
The four other keywords produce approximately 5,500 searches per month combined, so if I can get good rankings for these, I will have a good base with which to build upon.
Looking Ahead
Given that I have been through this process before, I have certain expectations for this site. I hope to see encouraging results pretty soon. Ideally, I would like to be on the first page of Google for at least one of the low-competition keywords within the next few weeks.
I am also building backlinks to the higher-trafficked keywords (it’s never too early to start!), but I don’t expect to see anything too impressive from them this early on. Having said that, SEOmoz have discovered that links with related anchor texts can be very beneficial in ranking for more competitive keywords. So my long tail backlinking strategy may also benefit my long term plans to rank for more highly-trafficked keywords too. We shall see!
Read The Whole Series
- My First Authority Site: Deal With Anxiety
- Update #1 – The Value of Experience
- Update #2 – An Evolution
Creative Commons photo courtesy of britl