How To Get Good Search Engine Rankings Using Quick 'N' Dirty SEO or "Leveraging The News" Strategies

How To SEO Your Site To Take Advantage Of Any New Product Launch

This a response to an article I wrote previously addressing some of the comments and about why this strategy works.  You might want to read that article first.

Competitve Analysis

What I left out from the other article is some of the competitive analysis I did to assess whether or not I could get a decent ranking for my site PPCDominationReview.com. (I wish I had saved some screenshots so I could show you the before and after, but I didn't have the foresight.)

With the exception of one site, ppc-domination.com, all of the other sites in the top 10 didn't seem to be targeting "ppc domination" as a keyword (as a side note, ppc-domination.com is the only site left on the first page from before the launch.)

So, before the launch, the results for the keyword "ppc domination" were mostly long-tail.

This told me that it probably wouldn't be that difficult to rank for "ppc domination."  And I knew, from the launch date, that those keywords were about to get a significant amount of traffic, mostly from people looking for whether or not it was worth purchasing--people looking for "reviews."  So PPCDominationReview.com as a domain name made a lot of sense.  The keywords in the domain name would give me a big boost for SEO.

How Google Works

As for the site structure, here's where understanding Google comes in.  Google's business model relies on giving people good results for their search queries.  But Google estimates that 20-25% of their searches have NEVER been seen before.  Another estimate on a smaller AOL dataset put it as 59%.

In order to be competitive, Google absolutely MUST address this market even if they have no idea what is is! (i.e. they don't know what the searches will be, but they know they have to deal with them.)

Google has evolved to be much more complex with link graphs, PageRank, etc. but at it's core it still relies on Latent Sematic Indexing (LSI) Check out Ferny's original forum post.

After all, for long-tail terms, there aren't very many links floating around and it's hard to get a big PR with a long-tail term.

I knew that with the PPC Domination launch, that a ton of people would be releasing all sorts of content onto the web.  This massive amount of content would be using words like: PPC Domination, Jim Yaghi, Mike Dillard, Magnetic Sponsoring, Aaron and Sophia Rashkin, review, course, and all sorts of variations, etc. 

So from a user perspective (and thus a Google perspective), it would be important to include a page for each of these major topics and include the relevant keywords from that topic on each page, all on a single website.  That way my site would be the most authoritative site and would therefore get a high ranking. 

On-Page SEO

Since there wasn't any time to build get any links indexed, I would have to rely on on-page SEO exclusively.  With an already strong domain name, I added my keywords into the site's meta description, H1 and H2 tags, alt text for images, links to other pages on the site, outbound links (to my affiliate page), and bold and strong tags. 

Sitemaps

As for the sitemap, I actually submitted it very early without any content on the pages themselves.  It was a bit of a risky strategy, but I wanted to get myself into the Google crawles queue.  I figured that by the time they got around to crawling it, I'd have all of the content completed.  It would have been bad if they crawled the site while there wasn't any content on it.  There was a study posted on SEOmoz.org about how much faster sites are crawled when sitemaps are submitted.  In the test they found that without a sitemap, the site was crawled within 1375 minutes.  With a sitemap, Google crawled it within 14 minutes.  Granted this was for an established website, but I bet the trend is similar for brand new sites.

In this case, it was entirely implementation speed.  It was really about finding an opening for an SEO strategy and reacting to the market faster than it changed i.e. having a site in place before the market needed it.  With an announced launch date, these types of things are easy.  If I had done this sooner and built up some links for an even higher ranking, I probably would have made a lot more money.  Ferny didn't know it, but it was basically a race between us to see who would get indexed first.  Our site structures are basically identical and regardless of what he tells you were developed completely in isolation. 

That was pretty much it.  Now that it's a week later, the competitive landscape is much different for these keywords, and as such my site has dropped a few rankings because I don't have very many inbound links.  More established sites that added a "ppc domination review" page are outranking me.  I'm going to build the link up the profile for the site and get some of those rankings back.  But I'm still #1 for "ppc domination review" and I'm planning on holding on to that one.

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When Joseph O'Day isn't SEOing or helping out with SEONetworker.com, he's working on the upcoming beta launch of www.HowBigWillMyDownlineBe.com as a viral prospecting site with social networking (Facebook) integration that helps you sell Magnetic Sponsoring products.  The focus is on visitor engagement and advanced tracking to make sure you spend your ad dollars and time wisely.  To learn more about this launch, opt-in at http://www.howbigwillmydownlinebe.com/affiliates/beta-launch/