seo

Am I the the greatest SEO in Ireland?

Maybe but that’s a question i’ll be able to answer shortly. I’ve just heard about an SEO competition which i’m definitely entering - i let far too many of these competitions pass me by and it’s about time i got stuck in.

I have until December 1st at 3pm to rank no.1 on google.ie for the phrase: geansai gorm. To all my international readers, that translates as ‘blue jumper’.

Here are the rules (taken from mulley.net);

• Entries open to all Irish individuals and Irish businesses.
• Search is to be performed on google.ie. Without Pages From Ireland selected, with personalisation off and from an Irish IP address.
• The domain to rank must be a new domain. Must not contain the keywords in the domain name at all and no ccTLD domains are to be used.
• Only want the homepage to rank, not other non-useful pages.
• 301 redirects are not permitted.
• Keywords as gaeilge instead of english but copy can be in English

Fair enough, it means we’re all on a level playing field. I’ve just over 5 weeks until D Day so i’ll have to act quickly and get the thinking cap on. As the rules state, this has to be a brand new site. The reward at the end of it all, will be to see where i’m at against the rest in terms of SEO.

I have managed to topple wikipedia & government sites with theleavingcert.com in the past without any real ‘deliberate’ SEO work so it’ll be interesting to see how i get on with this. 5 weeks isn’t much time though for me… i guess the good thing about that is that everyone else is in the same boat.

Let the games begin

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climbing mount google

Earlier this week, i discovered the internet equivalent of a goldmine.

As we all know goldmines are priceless… but they don’t mine themselves… it takes time, effort and patience. The problem i’m faced with now is something most people struggle with - i have to rank no.1 in google 19 times across 19 niches in order to cement this larger niche over (I have 19 different domains).

Yes, i have the keyword.com’s, but i face tough opposition from some of the biggest sites out there - amazon, ebay, apple, expansys to name a few. It’s a massive task and will put my SEO skills to the test.

The domains themselves are worth a small fortune, but the real value is ranking front page on google for all of their terms - that’s ultimately what anyone buying the domains would have to do anyway to really see massive returns.

I’ve already set up 19 different sites, all using wordpress. I’ve decluttered them all and installed my favorite plugins. I’ll now have to find some SEO friendly themes, customize them all, then try to add content.

I’ll try to build up content on one of the sites first and do a sort of trial run… not many people have the luxury of ‘testing’ content on a keyword domain in which the keywords have in excess of 400k searches/month, but luckily for me, i’ve about 19 of these niches so if one site gets blacklisted or performs poorly, it’s not game over.

Although these niches aren’t massively competitive - (generally 3-10m results for each keyword in google), they are dominated by big sites like i’ve mentioned above so it’s not going to be easy… it’s not simply a case of ‘any content will do’ - each and every word i write will have to be written and re-written until i’m happy that it reads well for both humans and search engines. This blog for example is well SEO’d but usually i don’t write for search engine traffic…. i never look back over a post and try to optimize it for google because quite simply, it’s too time consuming.

Running over the figures, assuming 2 million searches / month in total across these different niches, let’s say 10% of those click on link no.1 (hopefully my site) - that’s 200,000 visits overall. Let’s assume a 2% click rate on ads at $0.10/ad (based on 200k page impressions). That equals $400/month. Lets say 1% of those 200,000 visitors buy something through an affiliate link at a modest $1 per sale my cut… equal to $2000/month.

All very modest figures and realistically, that combined $2400/month total could be increased 10 fold. So now you can see why i’m determined to nail down no.1 spots in google and hang on to these domains. It’s a niche with massive potential, but it pretty much all hinges on google rankings and organic traffic.

Running 19 sites with up to date, unique content is obviously impossible. Building them one by one is my best bet. I’ll probably never reveal any of these domains or sites, which may leave you wondering why i’m blogging about them… it’s because i’ve NEVER come across a niche as big as this online before, with a whole host of highly-searched-for keyword domain names unregistered.

As i’ve said before, the keywords in my domains, combined, get over 2 million searches per month in google.

Just as an example and to help explain what i’m talking about, the term ‘mens shoes‘ gets about 2.5 million searches in google per month and lets say i have ‘mensshoes.com‘ registered. That’s how big all of my niches and domains combined are.

My job is to get ‘menshoes.com‘ ranking no.1 - if i can do that, i’m sorted

jackpot!!!

It’s been an exciting few hours for me as i’m after stumbling upon a HUGE niche. I’m just after registering 15 domain names in the .com extension for a total of $90 with name.com.

These are keyword domains…

• 4 x 6 characters long
• 7 x 7 characters long
• 4 x 8 characters long

These 15 domains combined, have an estibot value of $14,210… which is good enough in itself as it shows a glimmer of their potential value. Here’s the stats on some of the domains according to estibot;

Here’s another… that ‘max PPC income/day’ means if the domain can rank no.1 in google for it’s key words, it can expect to earn $9.63 per day using adsense.

If i had to value these domains right here, now, i’d say they’d easily fetch $5000+ at auction (for all) and it’s not too often you’ll see me so confident valuing domain names. But here’s the real punch.

Those domain names contain keywords. Keywords which have been searched for a combined 1,918,600 times in google in july ONLY. That works out at over 23 MILLION searches per year. Holy shit! That’s a lot of potential organic traffic

And it’s a real product too - not virtual services…. cold hard products you can pick up in your own hands and use. So this has massive potential for me to earn passive income through affiliate links.

The remarkable thing is - is that this is a pretty competitive niche, with plenty of ads in adwords and literally millions of search results. That sends the domain values shooting through the roof instantly.

Theoretically, i can rank no.1 in google for these terms as i now own the .com keywords. Due to the competition though it won’t be easy as i’ll have to out muscle some pretty massive sites like amazon.com, dabs.com and even ebay.com (yes, the product is IT related - which makes it all the more incredible that the domains were available!).

But no matter what happens, the domains i’ve bought today are worth a small fortune already and i’ve hit the jackpot in terms of unregistered domain names. Just yesterday i was furious with myself for not acting quick enough on an excellent domain name i came across.

The domain in question was ‘youngcarinsurance.com’ - not a fantastic domain, but i can tell you it has over 60,000 searches per month in google for those exact terms (hence the reason i was furious for not snapping it up ASAP). I’ve more than made it up to myself today though… one of my keyword domains got 450,000 searches last month in google alone

I still can’t believe they were all available… just goes to show no matter what people say, there’s ALWAYS some good unregistered domains out there for the taking. Doubt you’ll find any larger niches than mine though

Next week i plan on releasing some really golden information to you guys.. i said previously it would be in the form of blog posts for RSS subscribers only, however i’m thinking of creating a free ebook due simply to the fact that this information is too good to just let die. I’ve stumbled upon this massive niche using it. You’ll still have to subscribe to the RSS feed to get it however. More on that over the next few days….

matt cutts says pagerank penalties to be lifted

From the horses mouth;

“Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days.

I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.”

Interesting… is this google doing a full u-turn on paid links perhaps? We’ll have to see. Although i’m not interested much in pagerank these days, you can’t ignore it as it does have an impact on a site’s ’strength’ or influence - possibly affecting search results too…

catch me if you can!

I’ve just noticed theleavingcert.com is now no.1 in google.com AND google.ie for ‘the leaving cert’.

It’s no.5 in google.com for ‘leaving cert’ and no.2 in google.ie for the same term.

It now means i’m slowly starting to dominate the top google results for ‘leaving cert’ results and the likes of government backed ‘education.ie’ and intel/aib/irishtimes backed ’skool.ie’ have to take a back seat to make room for me and my ‘theleavingcert.com’

That’s not a small achievement by any means and it shows you just how much i’m learning when developing sites on a shoestring budget.

Onwards an upwards i say! Now that i’m no.1 in google.com for both these terms, good luck trying to catch me

This is a site that hasn’t been updated much, yet it’s still kicking ass in google SERPS. Looks like my decision to switch from joomla to wordpress was a very wise one. I’ll pat myself on the back for that.

I’m also lucky i didn’t sell the site, as it’s now starting to become top dog in anything ‘leaving cert’ related. A couple of months ago, i would have sold for $500. You won’t get it for that now, not at the minute… it has too much potential.

This was my first ever ‘proper’ site and goes back to August 2006, so it’s extremely rewarding to see it right up there with the big guns at the top of google - that was always my goal.

With my newly acquired design skills, i may well spend a few days pimping it out and then it’s a case of keeping the content flowing. It’s tough when i’ve so much else to do, but i’ll give it my best shot and try to get it right for September.