Billy Blue Hat

I am about a week into my case study site – having started last Tuesday evening (it’s Wednesday afternoon, now).

Let me recap for those who are joining me here (and you can see the other posts under the case study category):

Summary

• A brand new site and domain targetting a semi-electronics niche
• Two 500-word articles around the general subject
• Three ~300 word review articles of actual products, with images and text links to the product on Amazon
• Roughly 10 backlinks submitted through Build My Rank to target the keyword (not always an exact anchor match)
• Site pings to RSS directories etc
• Google Analytics and Webmaster tools installed

I was hoping that over the lastr week I would have the opportunity to update the site by Qing up more posts to publish and some more Build My Rank submissions, but it’s not worked out that way.

First visitors

As I mentioned when I first started this case study I was looking to see how quickly this strategy could get natural, organic visitors from Google, and ultimately how long it took to get an Amazon sale through the site.

Well, my first visitors came through Google yesterday, to one of my 500 word articles for a fairly long tail keyword I had been targetting (btw, part of this long tail I got from Google Insights for search as it showed it as a rising search term – it’s a useful tool).

Whilst there were only two distinct organic visitors, one of them proceeded to click on one of my Amazon links, meaning

I had a conversion from the site in within a week. (No sale though!)

What next?

I will of course be adding more content – probably 2 more long articles and more product reviews to try and pump up the long tail (and short tail) impressions from google.

Of course I will be targetting each of this with ideally 5 Build My Rank submissions to generate backlinks.

What does this prove?

Hopefully this will help those out there struggling for motivation. As Dave has been saying over the last few weeks over at Making Money Online that it is not too late to start targetting the Christmas market, and he’s right!!

It is also good to know from my own perspective that my strategy works to get a new site into Google and reacting to natural, organic search terms. It doesn’t matter that it has only been a week (which is cool), but it matters that the recipe I follow really is effective, and there is no shady tactics here – just good onpage SEO and quality content.

Stay tuned

I will keep updating this case study until I get my first sale at least. Who knows, maybe I will turn it into a 3000 word post-mortem case study for Dave’s site ; )

Only went in for the basic package of 40 - which could actually equate
to 200 links if it falls right. Used a trick that I read about on
Leo's old site (before he wiped it clean!) about page shaping, where
you try and use the forum profile page to skew the weight of the page
more towards your target keywords, meaning the search enginges treat
the links more seriously for your keywords (hopefully).

Used Google Insights to take a list of rising searches to exploit. If
this goes well (I will be monitoring the progress and reporting back
here), I will definitely fire off another package to try and piggy
back on Christmas. Whilst this isn't a niche that perfectly suits
Xmas, it should see an impact. It is on one of my oldest domains
which gets a good stream of traffic (converted at 30% today), so I
want to up the game a bit with it to try and capture MORE traffic.

Didn't do much else today. Certainly enjoyed how easy BP was to use
but still loving build my rank.
<3

However, stay with me, as it relates to the core tool and strategy of
my backlinking efforts for this site case study - Build My Rank.

After queuing up about 20 posts to go out for my star performer site
(I'm upgrading to go for a bigger, fatter and most definitely a single
word keyword), I unleased the beast and instructed BMR to no longer
publish 1 or 2 posts, but to do more like 6 posts a day, which is
aimed at a Christmas run up boost in conversions. One thing I have
noticed is that for those posts that are lucky enough to make it onto
a network site with PR1 (and not PR2..4 etc), the indexing by Google
is FAR quicker. Some of my posts have been on PR4 sites for a week or
so, and are not yet directly indexed - I'm not worried, because they
will turn up, or I can make them turn up with a few crafty links here
or there.

This is a good observation in the build my rank case study as to how
the search engines prefer and give better treatment to higher
authority domains.

You'll note that I was curious and not concerned, and that was because
- despite this obvious drop - I was getting as much, if not more
traffic than before. I can't give you a reason as to why the
algorithms decided that my site's index was no longer worthy of the
front page, but this helped highlight that most of my traffic is going
straight to my content pages (as is ideal), and not to the front page.

So, if this happens to you, and you don't notice a drop in traffic -
don't worry about it too much. Needless to say, the site is now back
on page one, settling back into its slightly below the fold position
(doh).

Note: It's probable that this shift in SERPs came about through a
dodgy backlink or increase in BL activity.

Yesterday my case study site showed up in Google. From what I have
read lately around G indexing technology, they are trying to get
faster at indexing new and fresh content, and as this site showed up
pretty quickly, they are probably getting better at registering when
new domains go live.

As a side note, I really believe that submitting posts to RSS pinging
directories and adding your site into the Google Webmaster Tools are a
sure fire way of getting indexed super quick. Note that I do not
think that getting indexed quickly is any benchmark or at all
important.

Doing a check today, I can see that my site has all of the content
pages indexed, as well as just the root domain, which is encouraging.

From looking at my logs, it looks like I did have one visitor arriving
from the Baidu search engine, but given that I am targetting US sales
- and more importantly, English speakers, I am not inclined to accept
this as my first "search engine visitor" - plus it is really too
quick.

Not worked on any more content or backlinks for the site as yet, but
spent my commute home writing 10 more submissions for Build My Rank to target a single keyword for one of my best
performing sites. Previously I had been targetting a more niche term
in the segment, but now that almost seems saturated I am going after
the big one word keyword search term!

Google recently released their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide for 2010. This is a long overdue update to a web page they have had for some time, and provides much more detail as to what they look for in a site to rank it well.

I have summarized the 32 page document and tried to make it relevant to the world of IM. Obviously your mileage may vary, and people may disagree with the points below. Bear in mind that people who are operating contrary to the below may not have future-proof sites; Google are always looking to weed out spam, so do yourself a favor and make sure you are producing good quality content, and not doing anything too shady when it comes to backlinks.

• Use the title tag considerately. Give each page on your site a unique title. Don’t use an excessively long title and don’t keyword stuff it.

• Meta description tag is still used, but not always shown on search results. Use a different description per page if you can and don’t keyword stuff it.

• Simple URLs are important. Don’t use generic page names, stuff keywords into file names or have excessively deep directories. Avoid misleading users with confusing directory names.

• Ensure each page as only one address.

• Have clear, easy to follow text links. Don’t use a complex web of navigation maps, and ensure content can be accessed with a minimum of clicks.

• An HTML sitemap page, with links to all your content, ensures search engines know about all your content. Keep it up to date, and keep it organized by subject if possible.

• Use your 404 pages wisely. Don’t let them get indexed, but DO provide the user with useful information, and try to keep a consistent design.

• When producing content, bear in mind natural search queries and traffic. People are unlikely to search specifically for your target keyword, so massage your content to capture things like best keyword, cheapest keyword, where to buy keyword

• Use clear, correct and valid content. No spelling mistakes and don’t embed images to substitute text.

• Don’t try and hide text from users but expose it to search engines – that is so last decade.

• Keep anchor text short, concise and relevant. Ensure that anchors are as on-topic as possible and describe the target page accurately. Again, don’t stuff keywords into the anchors.

  • This is one of the things I missed first time around building my sites, and as such had to go back and deploy my internal linking structure. Make sure you get it right from the start.

• Make use of the img alt=“” tag; it can get you a lot of traffic from Google image search. I tend to keep this the same as my page/post title.

• Likewise for image file names; I am the second image in Google Image Search for my target keyword…thanks to a good file name and alt tag.

• Keep your images in the same (or as few as possible) static directory.

• When using headers (h1, h2 etc.), keep the use consistent. Don’t start the page with an h4 and then have an h2 further down, it’s not natural. Define reading structure with headings, but don’t overdo it (use bold and italics for emphasis).

• I’m going to skip the section on nofollow! But you should be nofollowing links to external sites, but keep a few in there (with poor or non-competitive anchor text) to make the site look natural.

Content Promotion (backlinks!)

• Google advises that you avoid backlinking each small bit of content on your site and cocnentrate on just promoting the bigger ones. Those in the IM community who focus on big, 1000+ word plus posts need not worry about this, but if you’re adding a product review with just a picture and a rating, it may look questionable to Google if you hammer it with backlinks. Would hundreds of people really link to it? However, a 2000 word article on which is the best toaster to warm croissants might be more interesting.

• Don’t use unnatural link promotion systems. Ahem

• Don’t buy links just for PR juice, and don’t spam genuine community sites in your niche for links; they are more respected by Google and could have a quiet word with the G boss. Of course, there is nothing stopping you trying to build a solid resource for use by said community.

I have three review posts and one information post scheduled to appear
on my case study site between now and early next week, at about a rate
of 1 post every other day (which gets pinged to the usual RSS
directories etc. all automatically). The idea is that whilst these
are queuing up to go in, I am able to spend my time building backlinks
and scheduling new content and I don't have to worry about the site
getting new content all the time. (If you've read any of Leo's
writings, he would hate this approach! He tends to add an entry a
month!)

At the moment, 2 of the three review posts have 2 Build My Rank
submissions targetting them, one link will go live the day after the
post is live, and the second link the day after that. The information
posts also have 2 each, and there are a handful to the root domain.

Still nothing on the Google index, and certainly no organic site visits.

A note on Build My Rank

So much easier that UAW was. Whilst I don't doubt the power of UAW,
it just does not work for me on my schedule.

You can check out BMR via my affiliate link here: Build My Rank.

Good luck!

Whilst I am adding and scheduling the content, I wanted to outline the
linking strategy I'll be using:

1. Each post or review will contain one internal link, either to the home page or another post/review
2. Each review will have two links to Amazon, one as an image above the fold and another text link below the fold
3. The page template has fairly prominent sidebar links to Amazon
4. All offsite links are nofollowed
5. Each post will receive at least 2 backlinks from Build My Rank in order to promote them; this should lead to a decent chunk of backlinks over the whole site

Not the most complicated or over the top strategy, but I believe with
decent content this is not needed.

Bear in mind I am not doing this full time, and have been also much
encouraged by Lando and his comments (from Docking Bay 94.

Case study

The site is working in a relatively unexploited niche (famous last
words), and went live today.

Site details

• 1 page of content (300 words), more posts scheduled to drip in over the next days
• Monetized via Amazon sidebar links and will have product reviews
• Using a .info domain with target keyword in the name, with a filler word on the end
• Static site, pretending to be a Wordpress site (someone once said they rank quicker, probably rubbish)
• Indexed pages: 0

I'll be updating this over the next few days with progress

Being a bit more technical that some IMers, I have put together quite
a broad system that allows me to deploy content and sites very
quickly, and I have stats, tracking and A/B testing built into all of
them so I can get a good insight into what people are doing when they
arrive on my sites. That said, it would be far more worth while
churning out content, but I just can't stick at it that religiously.

Seen some musings over on Dave's blog about Build My Rank, so I have
pushed 5 posts through it on the free account; very keen to see how
they turn out.

I'm planning on putting together a "making money with Amazon"
fundamentals post soon, which should break down the basics as to what
you need to do, and what commong mistakes to avoid.