Land of Guru

My first website has been officially ranked by google. It is not on the first page, far from it, but I am already getting organic search traffic and it is climbing ranking daily. Here are a few things I have learned from the guys at 30DC which have helped me and my site get noticed by google:

1. Aim small, miss small. Some of the niches you can choose to build a site around are too large. Expecting to get a good ranking for a search term that has millions of competing web pages is far fetched, and could take months or years. Not sure about you, but I am impatient. I need fast results, and look to start making money with my new sites withing 3-4 weeks.

If you have a large niche idea, take it, then drill down even further to find a micro niche. My definintion of a micro niche are longer keyword strings(2-4 keywords) that have less than 50,000 competing web pages. Instead of choosing to build a site around dogs, look deeper and research “cocker spaniel tips”,  “labrador toys”, or “exercise with dog”. The fewer competing sites you have, the better your chances of ranking on page one, and the fast your will climb the page ladder.

2. Organic Traffic is Free Money! Why wouldn’t you want free money?!? The great thing about free traffic is it allows us to test different site designs, sales tactics, and product offerings without breaking the bank! Imagine the stress of spending all your advertising dollars, not knowing if your visitor will buy, or if you will recoop any of that money. 

Refining your site with free traffic will allow you to calculate exactly how much each visitor is worth. After your testing, then you can begin spending money on advertising, knowing accurately what your return will be. 

Google has a free tool for you to check how many people search for your keywords. Try it now, and see what your organic traffic possibilies are.  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal  If you don’t have atleast 1,000 searches a month, I suggest picking a different keyword.

1. Stupatch Says:
   August 19th, 2009 at 5:58 pm

   Thanks for the advice Brandon, it just goes to show how saturated the search engines are with web pages these days. The one thing I can never get my head round however is how certain ranked google listings of pages that are of less relevance for a search a term than another… for example keepin the theme of dogs running say you are just getting started and you have a web page that is purely about “dog walking services + whichever district of the city you live in” google under its ranking system will naturally place a more link popular web page that could be a dog walking service over 15 miles away which is no good and of no relevance to that person who has performed the search … surely if a page has keywords, description, and content specific to a service and the area it should still rank as a more relevant web page in google listings regardless of link popularity. I suppose maybe google are cleverly doing this more and more so that new websites to get a search engine presence will have to opt for Google Adwords as an early solution to the problem.