Tag: "SEO"

SEO Case Study – 4 Sites: Blog Network Links

Today it’s been a month since I’ve started my SEO experiment, but anyway the name of the post is not like “1 month update” since the experiment seems not to have been completed yet )

After I wrote my last post about this, it’s been a lot of offline activity that kept me off of doing a lot of work with this promotion, so I went kinda semi-automatic way and decided to leverage the “power” of blog networks for backlings building.

It took me 10 minutes to scrape the Ezinearticles for several shot 250-350 word articles to be used as a source for my posts. I rewrote one of the articles and placed it into the blog network with the main keywords as anchor texts inside my post.

Next, I simplt uploaded my post and specified the # of posts to be posted to the network on a daily basis. That’s it.

All I have to say, after the couple of days I’ve lost all my rankings in top 100 position I previously had. However, in other 2 days, the rankings claimbed back again, but what’s the most interesting? Let’s take a look at the screens:

Site #1 rankings for 02.01.2010:

My main presell subpage is ranking for the main keyword on 66 position and 2 other long-tail variations on positions 84 and 14.

Site #2 ranking:

The root domain ranks on position #8 for my main keywords and also a subpage holds positions for 3 long-tail keywords.

Site #3 dances around 3-5 page of Google for main keyword, still no rankings for long-tail variation.

Site#4 ranking:

Just as I expected, this is my worst performing site so far, it occasionaly hits 7 page for the variation of the main keyword (which is exactly it’s domain name) and sometimes it gets kicked off of his positions, then comes back again.

Overal Result of Blog Network Strategy:

If you compare these screens with the previous post positions, you’ll find that I only hit the page 1 for 1 keyword only, which won’t give me the necessary traffic for making some sales. To be frank, I haven’t made a single sale yet, and this led me to some new thoughts…

As for the backlinks from the blog networks, I can say that I there are some good and bad points that I found after doing this test.

Good points:

1. You need only 250-300 word low quality article + 2-3 variations to create a good spin

2. You may place up to 3 links into each post (that lead to the domains or subpages you specify) – not that strict as with article directories.

3. The process is on autopilot – you just write article, spin it and submit to the blog network – the rest is done for you, posts are spreading out over the blogs automatically, backlings grow every day.

4. Blog network backlinks a good automated way to support your “links wheels”, so you can devote only a fraction of time to your links network maintenance, and submit 1-2 articles on a monthly basis to keep growing your links and maintain your high SERPs.

Bad points:

1. The quality of backlinks is not too good for targeting some competitive keywords, like mine.

2. If you do it wrong, google may actually devalue your site positions (like it happened with me) and even sandbox your site (thanks God it didn’t happen to my sites), so you can say “goodbye” to your fast earnings and wait until the sandbox is gone.

3. Participating in a blog network usually requires ongoing membership fees, which is not good if you’re on a tight budget.

4. Blog network is NOT a one-stop solution to your SEO backlink building efforts, this strategy has its limits, and works well under certain circumstances only.

Ok, I’ve made a lot of work in these days in terms of planning and thinking over my whole busness, and I’ve planned everything, so I’ve got a different strategy for pushing these 4 sites to the top.

As you can see, I’ve done my keyword selection more than 1 month ago, and after 1 month of work I’m still not seeing return (I mean $$$ ). However, I think I’ll write another post soon about some interesting experiment I’ve made secretly )) that gives a KEY to fast SEO success…

Stay tuned mates, as I seem to have positive results and vision for my whole SEO model and system…

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SEO Case Study – 4 Sites: 2 Weeks Update

Hi!

I’ve decided to create update post since now my experiment came close to the main part which is link building.

So far, the last 13 days were pretty hard since I had to do lots of manual work that requires lots of time.

Ok, what I’ve done in the last 13 days:

1.Audience research & writing sample presell copy for one of my sites

I did a market and audience research and wrote my presell copy for site 1. I’ve noticed that once I start writing, I cannot stop so my copy has over 1300 words in it. Pretty long but on the other side it’s interesting how well it will perform.

2. Outsourcing the rest of the content cheap

Next (and what took me so long to create content), I’ve decided to outsource the rest of the presells and feeder articles for my sites to the article writing service.

First, I thought to hire a good writer on GetaFreeLancer.com or Elance.com, but that could take some time and more spend since native american writer who’re good at writing will bid much more than I can afford now. I’m still on the tight budget.

So, I’ve decided to actually test how good are the writers on the article service that I use, and took some time to write a project descriptions and provide all necessary resources and examples of how I want my presells to be written. I attached my own presell copy for site 1.

The typical article would cost me around 6$ while I paid only around 9$ fore more researched presells. That is VERY CHEAP for this kind of work since it requires doing good audience research before creating a copy.

Results:

Overall, the quality of articles as well as presells was great. I found one writer who wrote extremely good presell even much better than me, in a very communicative manner like an ordinary person would write. She also met ALL my requirements and seems that she perfectly understands what I needed. So I chose her to write the rest of my presells.

The only one kinda negative thing abou this – time. It takes time for the writers to write since I’m not the only their client, but even after they wrote the article, it can take even more time for proofreaders to do their work. So, i had some articles written in 2-3 days and finished (passed proofreading) in extra 4 days.

This is why it took me so long to create all my 4 sites and get all the content done.

3.Hosting, Wordpress, themes & plugins setup + writing “must-have” pages

While the writers were busy creating my articles, I did a lot of dull stuff like choosing and uploading appropriate themes for my sites (I use wordpress), installing and configuring all the necessary plugins and writing these about me, contat me and privacy policy pages. I left only Privacy the same on all 4 sites, the rest of pages were unique for each site.

4.Creating meta data for proper on-page optimization

I’ver also done some additional research for creating proper meta data, such as title, headlines, description and keywords tags. This is critically important for on-page optimisation, and also gives the opportunity to rank for 2-3 additional long-tail variations of my main keyword. You only need to write meta really smart.

I did the same not only for the site, but for every article I’ve submitted to my sites. I also placed some internal links in my articles with main keyword as anchor text targeting my domain.

As you can see, this extra work I’ve done now turned mysite into a strong threat to the current top 10 since none of them actually has good on-page optimization.

5. Uploading articles and indexing sites

As soon as I got articles ready, I uploaded them to my sites, optimized and simply bookmarked every article and also pinged it.

As I’ve noticed, my sites got indexed by G after 3 social bookmarking submissions: 1 for the whole site, 1 for post #1, 1 for post #2. I also twittered all my sites.

Super-fast Indexing Tip!

For my last site, I’ve decided to test if Google will index a site linked from brand-new Blogspot blog. I’ve created a blogspot blog, placed one related article on it, created 3 links to my site and pinged & social bookmarked Blogspot blog.

Results? Blogspot blog was indexed in 1.5 hours! My site – after 3 days of adding more content, and extra SB work… Just a tip…;)

Overall Progress

To this moment, all my 4 sites are completed and indexed by Google. I’ve made no backlink building yet (except social bookmarking links), since this is what I gonna do now.

The only reason why it took me so long to do it all is content outsourcing. I wanted it for cheap, so I had to sacrifice my time to get it done. However, I can say that I’m happy with the quality of content I’ve got from the writing service.

I’ll write about it in my future posts, now the most interesting part comes in, so stay tuned!

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My Recent SEO Success and Failure

I meant to write this post long time ago, since I’ve actually stopped promoting my old landing page in organic results.

This was a typical lander with a story-type presell on the main page and links to the product I was recomending. I’ve analysed the market and found other competing products that solved the customer’s problem. Next, I wrote a good presell and added blog to feed my lander with some articles for better QS on Google.

The offer didn’t really take off in search ppc, so I paused campaign after analysing it and seeing no potential.I’ve made some sales however, and not a single refund.

In October I’ve decided to give this site another chance and started to pick keywords for my SEO. I’ve analysed a bunch of different keywords using Market Samurai tool and cross checked everything manually. What I found is that one of my main keywords is actually my domain name! Cool, it’ll be easier to optimise this site then…

These 2 keywords had over 300 searches total per day (if my site is in top position) and the competition isn’t pretty hard, yet I needed to build some good backlinks to my site to get it to the top.

My strategy was pretty simple.I’ve decided to add content to my blog and use the same rehashed articles for article marketing.

I outsourced 20 articles on Getafreelancer.com – 3$ per 400-500 words article + 1$ per rewrite (2 rewrites) =5$ per article and 2 rewrites. Total cost 100$.

In 3 days I got all my articles written and started spinning them using Jetspinner free service. Usually it took me under 20 minutes to create a spin and I saved 50+ spins every time.

Article 1 – my blog post with 2 links: 1 link with my main kw to money page, I link with secondary kws to the previous blogpost.

Article 2 – I posted it to Ezinearticles with 2 backlinks to my money page with main kw and to my fresh blogpost with its main kw.

Article spins – I used them to submit articles to article directories using services like Article Blueprint and UAW. All backlinks were 1 – to my money page with one of 2 main kws and 2 – to my recent blogpost with it’s main kw. Each submission gave me around 400-500 uniqe backlins from different article directories.

Initially I was intended to post my 20 articles each day, and spend total 20 days for this site promotion, however…

1 – I got lazy

2 – I got other stuff to do

3 – I had to go to another hospital and didn’t have notebook for several days

So over a month (to November 3) I’ve submitted only 5 (!) blogposts and made only 5 article distributions. 15 other articles are still waiting …))

My second part of SEO was finding good high-PR one-way links to my site. I quickly found several hundred backlinks from blogs and submitted comments with 2 main keywords and my sites URL. I pinged every blog post I’ve commented in Pigngoat.com. I was lucky to add several dozens of PR 2- PR 6 1-way backlinks to my site.

Over the month, my site finally hit the top 10 in Google for both of my keywords.

I’m not doing any SEO with it now but it’s holding it’s positions for over 3 weeks already.

I’ll tell you the reason why I stopped promoting this site later, now it’s interesting to look at the daily traffic trends to my money page:

I see a spike of visits (over 100 visitors) on November 12, but then the average # of visits returns to 20-30 visitors daily. Not uncommon for position 8  in Google, espaecially when there are several adwords ads as well, so the traffic volume in the bottom reduces significantly. What I see however, the spike in traffic correlates with jumping to position 6 in one day, which is seen on SERPY tool as well.

I’ve checked backlinks and found that Yahoo counted only 97 backlinks to my site, mostly from the high PR blogs, and Ezinearticles and some other article blogs from my article distributions. As you can see, each article I submitted, was distributed to approx 700 directories – uniqe article version to each directory. Assuming that say, 200 directories reject the article, I should have 500*5 articles=2500 backlinks min. I have only 97, and most of them were from my manual link building.

So, even if you do article distribution, son’t forget to submit your spins to MAJOR article directories:

1. ezinearticles.com

2. goarticles.com

3. buzzle.com

4.  articledashboard.com

5. articlecity.com

6. searchwarp.com

7. isnare.com

8. a1articles.com

Whenever I analyse the top 10 rankings for different keyowrds, I see lots of articles from these article directories, that means google loves them and each their backlink counts 10X more than 100 backlinks from unknown sites that your articles are distributed to.

When starting promoting this site, I calculated that in case of at least 200 visitors to my money page daily and 1% conversion rate I could make 1-2 sales a day and earn 600 to 1200$ a month (commission was 21$). But on November 3 I’ve decided to click on one of my affiliate links and boom – I’ve seen an error message…

After contacting Clickbank, I found that the vendor simply removed his product from Clickbank, so I’ve spent 1 months of efforts and 100$ in vain.

Would you promote low-gravity products anymore? Me never!!!!

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