Is Targetting the Least Competitive Keywords Safe?

In my humble opinion for the average guy trying to obtain natural search traffic online, targeting main and competitive keywords is a fruitless task not even worthy of pursuit. From analyzing past websites I have owned and even a few currents ones I find no matter what you put up, people will find your content eventually through obscure phrases no-one could ever dream of targeting.

I’m beginning to think not targeting keywords might actually be the best approach - to forget them entirely and throw out keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Wordze. One things for certain and that is if you’re targeting big top tier keywords or even the least competitive keywords in your titles etc then Google will know right off the bat you’re attempting to manipulate their engine, which they may reward you with a long time-penalty or whatever else it is they do.

I guess what I’m trying to address here is whether or not it’s good practice to target small keywords because I’m building a few new sites and I’m still in the mind-frame of researching and building sites around words and phrases that people are actively searching for in the hope of gaining more natural free traffic.

I’m concerned this is an out-dated strategy and as website owners we can suffer for it but trying to determine this is difficult. I have read about a -950 penalty for over-optimization which some say using exact keywords in titles can trigger and Matt Cutts himself mentioned this subject in a video here which makes me wonder.. or worry.

I guess I’ll soon know, if one of my new sites ever gets re-included (I purchased a domain that was banned, put up good unique content and submitted a re-inclusion request on March 18th which I’m still waiting on).

Uhh - I’m beginning to wonder if I should have left this all behind and if returning back to it is a bad idea!

Matt Cutts & Matt Mullenweg Start a Gay Relationship

Firstly, I’m not suggesting Matt Cutts & Matt Mullenweg are gay or having sexual relations, what I’m referring to is the big gay totally-blown-out-of-proportion hoo-har in the Wordpress community about the use of ’sponsored themes’.

Sponsored themes can be used by anyone who uses Wordpress, free of charge, with the actual design of the themes supported by advertisers whom pay to have their URL at the bottom of the theme. The designer or creator of the theme receives money for their handy work.

Well that’s cool - right? Yeah, you would think so.. I mean, look at Template Monster where designers put Wordpress themes up and charge $300+ for the use - what sponsored themes for Wordpress do is allow anyone to use great looking themes for free, the only ‘cost’ is keeping the advertisers link at the bottom intact. You know, like software supported by advertising.

A bit like… search engines (and their staffs pay packets) supported by advertising.

A bit like… Wordpress supported by Matt Mullenweg creating un-related pages on asbestos, debt consolidation etc to game the search engines not so long ago using the high PR power of Wordpress.org from guess what? Having the ‘Powered by Wordpress’ link on every single damn un-modified Wordpress blog out there.

So I really don’t get why Matt Cutts or Matt Mullenweg have beef and are speaking out against sponsored themes. Sure if it was themes that were malicious or had hacker exploits in them, remove them from Wordpress.org etc - else just ensure sponsored themes are labelled, explain what that means and leave it as such.

Sponsored themes rock-on, not everyone can afford the cost of custom themes or the high price tags on Template Monster, and most ‘free’ themes are garbage, it only takes a brief look on Alex King’s popular Theme Viewer to notice that.

Using HitTail to Increase Your Organic & PPC Traffic

Although I believe directly targeting keywords on new websites can lead to being penalized by Google, I still believe it’s beneficial to indirectly target them within articles and pages on our websites.

For example, if you have a website on Weight Loss and noticed the secondary keyword ‘weight loss cure’ in Wordtracker reporting 689 searches, instead of targeting ‘weight loss cure’ and making that a title of a page, I believe it would be better to name the page ‘The Cure for Weight Loss Revealed’.. then you aren’t blatantly targeting a highly searched for term thus more likely to avoid any penalty which I strongly believe exists on Google, although I’m no professional.

I heard about HitTail a while back when it was first released and I’ve only just got around to taking a look at it and signed up today for their plus package at $4.95/month. HitTail is an analytics package with a difference. It’s uniquely focussed on tracking the search terms people use to arrive at your website, specifically the long tail search.

The Long Tail of Search

The keyword ‘weight loss’ receives 10,354 searches according to Wordtracker and of course this is a hugely competitive search term. The chance of the lowly webmaster or ameature ranking for it is zero - but you can get just as much traffic by targeting the secondary keywords related to ‘weight loss’.

The next 99 results in Wordtracker containing the keyword ‘weight loss’ contain in total 12,812 searches - more than ‘weight loss’ - and there’s over 1,000 of these terms so you’re talking perhaps in total over 30,000 searches per day on what’s called the ‘Long Tail’ of the search term ‘weight loss’.

Example of long tail keywords for ‘weight loss’:

• fast weight loss diets (78 Searches)
• best weight loss program (76 Searches)
• weight loss information (76 Searches)
• weight loss foods (75 Searches)
• free weight loss program (75 Searches)
• online weight loss programs 72 Searches)
• weight loss food (72 Searches)
• simply weight loss program (72 Searches)

These secondary words in the long tail are easier to rank for thus it’s more beneficial to target these when trying to achieve ranks in the search engines.

HitTail Is Different From Other Analytics Packages

You may think Google Analytics or other packages already track the phrases people search when they arrive at your site, and they do, but this is where HitHail differs - it creates lists of those keywords which you can sift through and decide to create pages around. It lets you move keywords and phrases on to a ‘To Do’ list and it won’t display duplicates once you’ve removed them from the original list or chose to delete them. Currently other analytics packages don’t offer these features.

It is possible to do this manually by importing your logs in to Microsoft Excel but to do it at the level HitTail performs at requires quite a bit of advanced knowledge of Excel - filtering duplicate entries etc and even then you’re unable to access keywords immediately as they happen without having to constantly import them and apply filters.

Using HitTail to Increase Your Organic Search & PPC Traffic

If by using HitTail you find people are finding a page of your website by typing in ‘blue widgets discount’ and you discover you’re ranking for ‘blue widgets discount’ in Google in 6th position, then you can go about improving that rank by tweaking the corresponding page with some basic SEO or even creating a whole new page specifically targeting the term.

For example, if the title of the page they’re finding is titled ‘Widgets Discount’, you could simple add ‘Blue Widgets Discount’ to the title and find in a short space of time that page getting a better rank - perhaps from 6th up to 1st place, delivering you a bucket load more traffic from that search term.

Not only can you use HitTail for improving your organic results but you can also use it to discover unique phrases that your competitors may not know about or be able to find in tools such as Wordtracker. You could then create pages for these terms to improve your organic results and also target them in your PPC campaigns on the cheap.

I’ll post an update on HitTail once I’ve used it significantly enough over a period of time to demonstrate its capabilities. At just under $5 per month I believe this service is invaluable to almost any website. Visit Hittail.com to learn more

White Hat is Pointless When..

A third party can influence your sites rank in a negative way.

After spending some time snooping around in a black hat forum, coupled with Google’s recent fuck-ups I’m beginning to wonder if continuing to build white hat content sites is an utterly pointless endeavour that can, and will, lead to disappointment and misery.

Asides from waiting out the sandbox release (which may never happen despite links, updates, quality factors etc..), there is the fact anyone with a little know-how of the dark side can literally fuck your website out of Google using simple techniques that apparently work like a charm.

Picture the scenario: You build a great content website, updated it daily with good content that costs you hundreds of dollars/month, garner plenty of healthy links and over the period of a year you managed to built a large resourceful site that Google accepted as a quality site, releasing you from the sandbox and you begin to enjoy a nice income from the site.

Now that you’re riding high in the search results for all of your targeted keywords, your competition takes note of your presence, some of which also dabble in black hat practices, or know of people who do, and are able to knock your website out of Google.. and there’s literally nothing you can do to stop them.

A few weeks or months after enjoying the lucrative earnings your sites traffic plummets and your earnings bomb to a few dollars/day, receiving only traffic from MSN and a handful from Yahoo.

It’s enough to make you think “fuck it, if you can’t beat them join them”, not to knock your competitors out of search results but simply so you have a back-up and another revenue stream that isn’t so reliant upon steady long-term rankings in Google which is any content sites bread and butter of traffic and earnings.

Remember: Google doesn’t give a fuck about you or your livelihood and third parties shall always be able to fuck with your website while Google state “there’s almost nothing anyone can do to affect your rankings”.

I’m feeling very pissed off with Google right now. If it isn’t for the de-indexing or the not re-indexing plenty of quality pages, fuckin’ up my page titles or handing the Chief Engineer a 5-week ‘vacation’ in a critical time.. and now I’m sat here wondering if the Google Toolbar that I have installed is capable of sending all of this right back to Google where they could easily spot who I am, what websites I own, which AdSense account to pull.. simply put, I don’t fucking trust Google anymore and I resent them.

Targeting Keywords could get you Penalized?

It would be all too easy for Google to determine which sites are targeting keywords and which are putting up content in a more natural way.

As SEO’s we’re told to build links naturally, while we still use every trick in the book on our sites to achieve higher rankings, which includes using keywords that are highly searched for (to some degree or another) in the titles etc, causing an un-natural looking site in regards to content.

Google know how often certain keywords are searched for and there popularity and they can surely detect websites that have a highly disproportionate amount of content or links that are targeting keywords that are searched for often, which may well trigger a filter - perhaps a longer stay in the sandbox or just added suspicion placed on the website.

Perhaps it’s time to forget keywords and ignore Wordtracker and Overture ever came on the scene as it makes our sites look a hell of a lot un-natural. Perhaps we wouldn’t even notice a sandbox existed if we didn’t litter our sites with popular keywords with obvious efforts to target them.

Remember: All of these spammers and folk who scrape content are all populating their pages with keyword after keyword after keyword, and that’s a pattern extremely close to every site we build when we’re targeting them ourselves.

Already Have an Established website? Duplicate it!

For those with established and popular websites hosted in the US and scoring medium to good rankings, you may wish to consider duplicating your efforts and using a UK host.

When I say duplicate, I don’t mean copy the entire site and contents causing alsorts of duplicate content penalties and potentially wrecking your current or new site.. I aren’t crazy! I simply mean take your keyword list, get a UK TLD domain, go with a hosting company with servers located in the UK and then employ your favourite content writer to re-write brand new articles for each of your keywords, create a new design, stock the site up and then upload it and begin the link building.

Almost instant results can be had from MSN.co.uk, with Google.co.uk and Yahoo.co.uk lacking behind, but once you’re past their various age filters you will be soaring in the UK rankings.

Reasons to duplicate your efforts in the UK or another fair-sized country:

- Weaker competition in country-specific searches such as Google.co.uk, Yahoo.co.uk and MSN.co.uk (it’s so easy to rank in the UK for great competative terms in MSN especially provided you’re hosted in the UK)

- Increased and more stable traffic and earnings due to the above

If there’s one thing that’s lacking in this game it’s stability. I believe this tactic provides us with that. Sure it’s lesser earnings then our global counter-parts but the stability is there, and that makes for a good reason to relax.