The Road So Far
Diary Of An SEO Campaign.
Day 50.
I'll bring you up to speed on what's been done, and you'll be able to follow my trek through SEOLand.
What I'm reporting here is my day-to-day struggle to promote a site that I launched very recently. It's simply called The Site. Its niche can be described as "Family." It is an advertising-driven site, meaning the only thing it sells is space on the site. It's an informational site.
What am I trying to achieve? Basically, it has to rank for the top key phrase in Google. By "rank," I mean hit the top 3. This is because it's one of those sites where the top phrase is the real money maker, and the so-called tail is so far behind it's barely connected to the head at all. There is a tail, of course, but when you are advertising-driven, you really need to drive traffic in big numbers, relative to your niche. Current goal: 10,000 visitors a day.
So far, I have:
- Built a high-quality, content-rich site
- Added a blog which I update frequently
- Optimized the site for keywords, in a user-friendly way
- Bought my way into some pricey directories, including Yahoo!
- Checked the backlinks of the competition, and started hustling for links from the same sources
- Submitted a couple of good, original articles to the best of The Article Submission Sites
- Added a useful forum
- Submitted to DMOZ
- Purchased a few well-chosen links from Text-Link-Ads
- Set up an alert tracker to monitor everything that moves, for me and the competiton
- Tried to sweet-talk a few authority sites into giving me a link
- Joined some relevant forums and left some thought-provoking comments
- Registered blog with a syndicating service
- Improved my content
I'm sure I've done a few other clever things, and that they will be disclosed as the days progress.
Success so far:
- A couple of really long-tail terms are showing up in the search engines, more so in MSN than anywhere, but even one or two in Google. In Google, I'm talking one term on page 2, and one on page 9. Adsense rewards generally still under $1 a day. Memo to self -- it's a long way to go.
- Getting about 100 visitors a day now -- sometimes a few more if we get a bump from my related "feeder-blog." The feeder-blog, set up a few months earlier, is actually getting about twice as much traffic as the site it's supposed to feed. Maybe I'm focusing on the wrong site!
- About a dozen registered users in the forum. I feel like I know them all personally. I'll have to add them to my Christmas card list.
Hanging in the balance: DMOZ. Submitted about a month ago, but despite (finally) an update by DMOZ, I'm still not listed. Sweating bullets. What if I don't get into DMOZ? Doomed, doomed!
Current effort underway: focused on preparing a major story that I think has some news, and on building a small, custom list of handpicked journalists to pitch it to. Just like it says in Aaron and Andy's 101 Ways To Build Link Popularity In 2006. Should be ready to send out the pitch in a day or so.
That's pretty much it so far. Still have to go back to MySpace after registering a few weeks ago. Need to let people know that I have a site they should see. If I can believe what I read in the press, I should be able to get about half a million "friends" over to see my site, just in the first 24 hours.
Tomorrow, I'll report back on whether I've been able to figure out that del.icio.us thing, and how to use it to my advantage. First I have to figure out how to pronounce it the same way twice.
Suggestions gladly accepted.
Technorati Tags: online marketing, SEO, links, link building
online promotion, search engine optimization, website promotion, search marketing
Day 50.
I'll bring you up to speed on what's been done, and you'll be able to follow my trek through SEOLand.
What I'm reporting here is my day-to-day struggle to promote a site that I launched very recently. It's simply called The Site. Its niche can be described as "Family." It is an advertising-driven site, meaning the only thing it sells is space on the site. It's an informational site.
What am I trying to achieve? Basically, it has to rank for the top key phrase in Google. By "rank," I mean hit the top 3. This is because it's one of those sites where the top phrase is the real money maker, and the so-called tail is so far behind it's barely connected to the head at all. There is a tail, of course, but when you are advertising-driven, you really need to drive traffic in big numbers, relative to your niche. Current goal: 10,000 visitors a day.
So far, I have:
- Built a high-quality, content-rich site
- Added a blog which I update frequently
- Optimized the site for keywords, in a user-friendly way
- Bought my way into some pricey directories, including Yahoo!
- Checked the backlinks of the competition, and started hustling for links from the same sources
- Submitted a couple of good, original articles to the best of The Article Submission Sites
- Added a useful forum
- Submitted to DMOZ
- Purchased a few well-chosen links from Text-Link-Ads
- Set up an alert tracker to monitor everything that moves, for me and the competiton
- Tried to sweet-talk a few authority sites into giving me a link
- Joined some relevant forums and left some thought-provoking comments
- Registered blog with a syndicating service
- Improved my content
I'm sure I've done a few other clever things, and that they will be disclosed as the days progress.
Success so far:
- A couple of really long-tail terms are showing up in the search engines, more so in MSN than anywhere, but even one or two in Google. In Google, I'm talking one term on page 2, and one on page 9. Adsense rewards generally still under $1 a day. Memo to self -- it's a long way to go.
- Getting about 100 visitors a day now -- sometimes a few more if we get a bump from my related "feeder-blog." The feeder-blog, set up a few months earlier, is actually getting about twice as much traffic as the site it's supposed to feed. Maybe I'm focusing on the wrong site!
- About a dozen registered users in the forum. I feel like I know them all personally. I'll have to add them to my Christmas card list.
Hanging in the balance: DMOZ. Submitted about a month ago, but despite (finally) an update by DMOZ, I'm still not listed. Sweating bullets. What if I don't get into DMOZ? Doomed, doomed!
Current effort underway: focused on preparing a major story that I think has some news, and on building a small, custom list of handpicked journalists to pitch it to. Just like it says in Aaron and Andy's 101 Ways To Build Link Popularity In 2006. Should be ready to send out the pitch in a day or so.
That's pretty much it so far. Still have to go back to MySpace after registering a few weeks ago. Need to let people know that I have a site they should see. If I can believe what I read in the press, I should be able to get about half a million "friends" over to see my site, just in the first 24 hours.
Tomorrow, I'll report back on whether I've been able to figure out that del.icio.us thing, and how to use it to my advantage. First I have to figure out how to pronounce it the same way twice.
Suggestions gladly accepted.
Technorati Tags: online marketing, SEO, links, link building
online promotion, search engine optimization, website promotion, search marketing
Atom XML
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home