Funny thing is you really shouldn’t feel so empty once you UNDERSTAND the emptiness. Astronauts can feel completely at home in outer space, because they know they’re coming home… are you?

I know, this is a strange analogy, so lets get to the meat & potatoes. I bet you’ve written some amazing content, added pictures, added the human touch… It was one of those posts on your website that you were sure was going to get tons of hits, tons of links and just a earth shattering server breaking level of traffic.

But… Come time to get it all up on the site, Digg it, Tweet it and everything… Nothing… A week later.. Google’s not pickin’ it up, and no mad rush of traffic!

There’s a few key areas that can make this happen and understanding is half the battle.

#1. Market Space

If you’ve just gotten started and your site is young… and your in a super competitive space, I mean like Viagra, Real Estate, Money & Credit, Weight loss, you can expect that it’ll be years before you see great rankings. In fact i’d say roughly 3 years to be exact unless you REALLY know what your doing and hit the gas pedal hard (and spend lots of money).

Picking less competitive markets is the key to really getting those overnight success stories happening to YOU. You really want to rank for those 100,000 hits per month phrases, but it’s not going to happen overnight for weight loss terms… But it might for an area like Brazilian neck ties.

Figuring out what markets are non-competitive and easy to rank for is no easy task, but my blog does offer a free book in our newsletter that helps you figure that out pretty quick… “unstoppable keywords” now free when you sign up to our newsletter.

#2. Domain Age & Link Juice

Yes, if you have an older domain name with trusted links pointing to it, some might see that as having a high pagerank like PR5 or better, while others may realize that just a few really trusted sources like CNN or even lesser trusted sources like about.com linking to you can help get you there. I won’t dig deep into what makes a trusted domain because that in itself would be a book’s worth and too much time to write.

#3. General Popularity

If social media and other small time bloggers pickup on your stuff, it can quickly provide the authority juice necessary to rank, if that doesn’t happen, no matter what you say won’t get found on a Search Engine…. Networking with related sites and asking them to link to you or offering them something for linking to you can definitely help here.

#4. Topical and keyword relevance

Having content that’s so well optimized (in some lightly competitive markets) can help gain the traffic your looking for. Using tools like the synonym finder and such can help you theme your content properly while using proper keyword tools like wordtracker in combination with Google’s and 7Search and other tools can give you the info you need to ensure your not writing about topics no one cares about.

Conclusion

In most moderately competitive niches (exercise, finance, computers, cell phones, travel) even if you’ve picked a super niche-specific area to write about where few others write, you still may find it tough in the first 3 years to start gaining any traction.

I bet you feel pretty frustrated by that and most people would. The old fashioned strategies play best here until the Search Engines realize just how valuable your content really is…

Assuming you already have amazing content, the next pieces to be focusing on while the search engines do their magic are:

* Join niche clubs and membership sites in your market space.
* Talk in related forums and get your name out there
* PPC advertise and contextual ad advertise if it’s within your budget to do so
* Join Twitter and tweet your good stuff and also spark conversations with related persons on Twitter using the @reply format.
* Slowly build up your newsletter list and offer way more content than you do advertising, in fact try not to sell anything if you can.
* Answer questions on Yahoo Answers related to your niche
* Sponsor events, organizations and other things… Even if you don’t get a link from it as long as you get the name recognition from doing it.
* use parasite hosting – yes that sounds ugly and it too is a book or post within itself.. But let me summarize parasite hosting from a good standpoint.
Using Squidoo, Youtube, Hubpages, EzineArticles and getting material on THEIR Domains to rank for your keywords with YOUR material (link or no link) to get your brand and tips and resources out there helps build brand awareness.

A parasite requires the larger organism to survive. That’s how it gets that name. Parasite hosting is when you post content on an older more reputable domain name that already has juicy link power and get a page on THEIR domain to rank for your phrases. Then leverage that traffic.

Those are just some of the strategies you can use while your site isn’t yet ranking for the terms you desire.

Daniel j Deyette
P.S. we don’t advertise or sell hardly anything but try to deliver insane value in our newsletter. Signup – It’s free!

It’s not as hard as you might think! What’s also interesting is how much optimization would be left to get this to a $250+ per month ads revenue. Mind you I know that’s not much, but automated cash is just that – free money, right? Beats breaking your back with a shovel anyhow.

Here’s some stats from the auctioning of the site itself:

Since it’s not my website, and it’s just some random website for sale on the Warrior forum, I don’t know how I could get in trouble discussing it, so here’s what I found!

Domain age…

Usually, with most sites even especially in competitive markets like weight, diet, quit smoking, Viagra, any legal term, real estate and other competitive industries, a domain name as young as this would not have early success of any kind… Maybe 30-50 uniques a day, so as you can see, with the registration info from whois.sc to the right here, this is pretty amazing early success…

Website Content

I wasn’t impressed with the content, but I would give it a 6 out of 10. It’s not the content you’d get hiring former New York Times employees, but it’s also not $5 articles from Indian outsourcers either. It’s mid-grade researched material that can be had from any starving college student for $10-15 each. Nothing earth shattering here.

Link Juice…

Yeah, come on buddy, you knew we were all going to look there… And I was at first incredibly impressed! I was thinking, I gotta study this (and this is probably where most of the inspiration to blog about it came from!) Then, I sorta got sad, that this is *WHY* He’s a PR3 with ONLY 1200 uniques a month and not 3,000.

But they’re impressive backlinks none-the-less and done correctly, it could have been a monster strategy instead of a ho-hum strategy.

What he did to get 1600 links from sites that Google trusts

• Blog Comments
  Some with keywords, some with usernames like ‘philly’ and some where there’s a blatant link just copied and pasted right into the body of the blog comment. (a bit spammy, yes but in some social circles this is like a signature line)
• Commenting on Reviews
  One of the smarter things he did was comment on reviews that were related to products in the weight, workout type markets. Quite neat.
• Being added to lists on powerful sites…
  http://sportsvl.com/bodybuilding/
  Links like this one are just amazing…
• Fast Company Magazine?
  Apparently all their comment links are DO-FOLLOW!
  Holly shmoley!

I won’t dig in any deeper as many of you have the tools to do that already (Yahoo site explorer and the domain name I mentioned). The thing is, 99% of the links this guy is getting aren’t REALLY folks voting for the site but just him influencing the search engine.

A link was designed to be a ‘vote’ saying “I like this website”. But if the owner of the site votes for himself 1160 times, and it COUNTS… how does that work? It doesn’t.

How to monster this strategy

Yes, it’s important to comment and be a member of your particular niche’s community, and i wouldn’t entirely fault the blog comment links like on fastcompany in general topics either, but there are ways of tightening the screws.

#1. Stay on Topic as much as you can.

Seeing links from search engine optimization website comments and such and other non-specific sites even if there WAS a great link opportunity makes me think this guy was spreading too thin. That audience on that page would not be likely to even WANT to look at his site anyway… Getting in front of the right audience of people who DO want your info helps quite ab it.

#2. Having juicy content on the site.

Once you do get the odd click from all those links you have out there, having stuff so amazing, so graphically enticing, so well wordsmithed that it jumps off the page like a mexican jumping bean.. I mean it doesn’t have to be poetic literature but a hint less textbook like… and those few who did click down to his website to see what he had would have probably linked back… If it were easy to…

#3. Making it easier to get links to you naturally

Adding the social sharing buttons at the bottom of your page helps dramatically to allow people to naturally tweet, email, send to a friend, digg, stumbleupon, linked in or other ways of viralling out your post, or web page. It’s so much easier to share content when it does have those buttons. Heck, I even LOOK for those buttons when I really REALLY like a post.

#4. Don’t forget to use competition spying tools!

Did you know SEO for Firefox works on Yahoo Site Explorer, imagine finding out which articles caught fire and got a ton of link juice and traffic and spin-off and using those to get your comments?

?

You know, a couple days ago I was reading an RSS feed on my Blackberry from SEOMoz. One of their writers had mentioned that he often watches auctions on Flippa from guys with young domains and HUGE traffic. He’s always using the comp intel tools to find out HOW they did it and how so quickly.

I dismissed it and thought that was something i’d look at one day if i had time, in the far off future. Of course, I won’t have time. But this was really cool and I just had to share it. Totally advanced SEO.
Until Next Time,
Daniel J Deyette

P.S. Hey!!!!! – Share this with the share buttons or tweet it, would ya! If you like it, someone else will. Helping others always comes back to you.

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I can’t steal the guy’s entire post, so go to his blog to read the rest of them… but you get the idea.

(read the rest)

I really do think that if you’re in a situation where you need brand exposure and visitor loyalty that – just as these very businesses folks steal from – did in the begining, they built a business the old fashioned way. You start off by creating an answer to people’s problems. You develop resources and supportive help materials (pamphlets, blog entries, web content, videos etc) to support the product. Things that help people even if they don’t buy from you… People love you so much they talk for hours about you and the message spreads… It’s that easy!

Now, even trustable and reputable guys like Seth Godin are stealing people’s brands and making money on them… All at the same time folks are building brilliant SEO campaigns all designed to borrow link equity to rank for the brand, make and model of products to sell those products at a commission of the sale. It’s getting ugly.

Truth is, all of these efforts to borrow searches for another person’s name are short term strategies. You can’t make long term money that way and you won’t build a long lasting business. People who are devoted to YOU… not Guess Jeans, not Ferrari motor cars, not Fender Guitars are going to come back to YOU over and over again… People who have a brand addiction are just that, addicted to that brand… The next time they want something the chances of them coming to you are like zip, zero nada.. So why keep doing it? Fishing for customers that won’t buy again and again? I Dunno.

Yet, leveraging brands (Like the Apple recent launch of the iPad) could be quite beneficial if done correctly. Using YOUR service and your products to enhance an industry product, does get your name out there, your brand and your products. Quite a wild idea. Check out how one guy used the iPad to sell diamonds.

Imagine the amount of links their site is getting from this beautifully executed link building campaign concept.

Daniel J Deyette

And to what benefit of her own, not much as I gather except a big $17,004 hole in her bank account.

That’s as good of a thank you as a slap in the face, I figure. I’m sure the exposure and links will probably re-pay her in effect, it’s really not much of a consolation to a fight that started in April 2008 that finally resolved March 11, 2010.

Thanks to Rhea, the industry doesn’t have to worry about someone suing them for using the term “SEO” to provide services, information or knowledge of any kind.

Don’t read my post about this anymore though as it’s not my thunder to steal. Go read Rhea’s post about SEO Trademark on her blog.

And if God has so blessed you with the ability to do so, maybe send her a donation (instructions @ bottom of her post) as a thank you to the fact that we do not have a 20-something kid governing our industry and the use of the term “SEO”.

That could have been ugly.
Daniel J Deyette

It’s an export of my brains to paper, a strategy that has personally given me hundreds of dollars in revenue and thousands of hits. Properly optimized this exact strategy followed as I explain it could produce you much more than it did me for a number of reasons I won’t get into here.

I had this happen twice, by accident!
I wrote a darn good article on purpose, but did a few things that accidentally gained it immediate attention and in some cases world wide press attention.
(Click the image for a full size copy)

This is a map I drew on a piece of a paper on my desk a few minutes ago, note my amazing artistic talent (Just kidding…) but regardless, if you let my drawing abilities get in your way, you’ll miss this. This map in itself probably has a value in the thousands, but let me break it down for simple folks – step by step so it can be easily understood.

Step 1. Ensure your ‘article repository’ is topic optimized

Basically, what I mean by this is make sure you group your subjects and topics that you cover on your website in a logical order and a logical link pattern on your website, blog or whatever you use to store all your articles online. Ensure they start with a main subject like “house building” and then below that it may cover roofs, structure, foundation etc.. under structure… You might cover screws, drywall, studs etc.

Make sure your site uses a proper URL structure.

I simply mean that it should be http://www.yoursite.com/post-title/ (IN wordpress that’s done by setting your permalink structure to %posttitle% or similar). This way an article’s title might actually be http://www.sermonadvice.com/sermon-on-the-amount/ for example.

Step 2. Setup your article or page for SEO and Viral Success!

There are a number of key elements that are so important to ensuring the page gets a ton of traffic that they are almost more important than the content itself! In fact, in some ways they really are. Things like having an exciting title that explains the benefit of reading it in the first place. Ensuring that title also has a keyword phrase that does get searched for using keyword tools.

Keeping The Humans Happy…

Yeah, they matter too.. Search engines are great, but it’s the humans that link back to stuff! I’m continuging to learn this the hard way, that it’s actually the humans that matter a little more than what Google MSN & Yahoo think. How do we keep them happy? Easy! Keep them entertained and educated with really nice pictures and really interesting materials. When humans find stuff that’s really interesting, really entertaining or educational and they find it super helpful… keyword being super .. They want to pass it on to friends, although some folks aren’t as tech savvy as others… and some are just lazy.. so having sharing buttons on the blog is super important! My favorite tool for that is SexyBookmarks, yeah – i know the name sounds nasty, but it’s totally safe for work and they look brilliant. I also think that the Tweetmeme button (I drew one in the top right of my fake page there) is a great tool.. There are also hacks to make tweetmeme faster too if you find that a problem. I don’t though.

I also mention adding page translation (Support other languages, and also other language search queries! More traffic!) and of course how important it is to have an email address collection box. I’ve always called them “Insurance” because they basically mean if SEO becomes competitive and Pay per click gets too expensive, you’ve always got your list to market to.

Step 3. Get your juicy content out there!

So, up till now all I’ve mentioned is “on page” strategy, nothing about getting your word out there. This isn’t Field of Dreams… “if you build it, they will come”. Fact is i’ve had some content i’ve written that i’d place a $1000 bet it’s the best there is on the internet about that topic, but Google doesn’t care! Google’s a machine with no ability to tell what’s good and what’s not, it leaves that part to the humans (Dumb silly Google!). Sad, what do we know? (kidding!). Anyway…

Get your juicy article talked about! Some markets (like internet marketing and computer topics) that’s easy! Nerds love to share nerdy stuff, so we’ve created lots of nerd link sharing sites, your industry may be different. So you might have to do different things to get your stuff to the masses, but here’s an overall gyst:

• Post on forums and mention your page..
  (if your page really is an article with juicy helpful stuff you won’t get in trouble for posting it… If it sells stuff you will get in trouble).
• Email and comment on blogs
  Interact with the owners and let them know about the killer resource you just wrote. If it’s that good, they’ll link to it too.
• Press Release – Journalists are always looking for new stories
• Relavent news sites – even they want in on this stuff
• Article sites – don’t do 200 of them, but a handful helps a bit
• Universities – Get some .edu links by telling students studying your industry about the article…
  Maybe they’ll click the share on facebook button on your article!
• RSS submission tools get the message to the search spiders if your article is on a blog.
• Socialmarker.com will post to all the social news sites free
• Reddit.com is easier to get the first page on than Digg is, but can help get you ON digg in the first place.
• Email friends, and other people in the industry about your new juice!
• Yahoo answers, I bet your article (if it’s really that good!) answers someone’s question out there!
• Pay Per Click – Yes, it costs money, but getting more people to an article with those share buttons could get it shared more..
  For a few pennies per click, couldn’t you use more email addresses and viewers and exposure? I Sure could!

If this article gave you a new idea, a new insight or helped in *any* way, please… do the right thing…

Click one of the share buttons below……

However, that’s simply not the case. Even with breaking news, we discovered last year when Michael Jackson passed away on us that Google was unable to keep up offering real-time results in it’s searches for appropriate terms…

What’s the big mistake?

From all the technical information I recieved thru various sources, and a few tests of my own… I saw websites popping up in Google within hours. Sometimes within hours of registration and zero links and starting to show up and rank… However this was not an effect of Caffeine taking action. This was a mis-leading fluke in some very non-competitive industries.

Spidering Indexing & Ranking

For the last 6 years I’ve been able to stand firm on the fact that it took 90 days to see the full effect of your effort in SEO, and it looked like in 2010, that would all change (As it should!). However, at least with this update, I strongly believe that’s not going to happen.

I noticed with some client websites in competitive spaces that the link strategies we applied are only now starting to take effect that are from nearly 2 months before… It’s hard to tell clients that to their faces when they’re so money starved, so anxious to make a buck that these long term investments will pay off… And in the SEO world, it’s easy to become unsure yourself! – But they do pay off.

I made the mistake of second guessing myself on that fact, and there are some general old-school strategies that are still getting results in low-lying markets and they will have a blip-on-the-radar effect on competitive markets… So it’s not without reason.

Anyway, enough ranting. Enjoy your day!

Rest assured that if your selling SEO even if you (By total fluke) see a bump in traffic in under 90 days it’s probably not intentional or should be expected…

Fact is everything’s going Pink… (No-Follow), and everything’s getting censored and all the old white-hats and blackhat’s aren’t working the way they used to… To re-cap here’s a few strategies that won’t work well for you in 2010…

• Article Marketing (unless you plan to become the guru of the topic)
• Social Bookmarking (a few sites help, but unless your content is fantastic… this is dead)
• Paid Links (Google has ways of figuring these out even if it’s not ever published…)
• Blog Comments (yes, even the do follows don’t do much)
• Wikipedia Links (For SEO? Nope.. But for click traffic it’s still good)
• Social Profiles (for link building no, for ranking for niche phrases.. maybe..)
• Parasite hosting (not very ethical… and they do get deleted, then what?)
• Directory Submissions (the main directories and niche topic ones.. will help, but the smaller ones wont.)
• Hub page creation (for niche phrases, short term strategy perhaps but not long term as competitors creep in)
• Guestbook Signing (hello 2003, I was finding this effective for a bit, but now they’re so heavily monitored…)
• Online classifieds (45 days worth of link juice… if it doesn’t get deleted…)

So what do you have to do to get rankings and long term traffic?

Fact is that one of my favorite things to say for the last 6 years has been this… If it makes good business sense to get advertising from a certain site or join partners with a certain site, then it makes good SEO sense too. The best strategy that existed before modern SEO strategy is to get people talking. Write about topics people want to hear about… I think this will be the age of Real time search, where believe it or not… Tools like the Google keyword tool, Wordtracker and those others will be completely obsolete…

Your new keyword research tools are:

• Twitter (search “I want to know…” – “I can’t find..”)
• Yahoo Answers
• Google Answers
• Forums around niche topics

By the time 30 days rolls around and the search volume data is available to Wordtracker and Google, it’s 30 days old. It’s ancient news. It may not even *BE* In demand anymore. Oh yes, you’re going to see that real time answers are the next big thing. If you’re not on top of your game, your niche. If your finger isn’t on the pulse of your customer’s wants, needs and desires, you’re dead in 2010.

Am I being unfair? Nope.

Update from Wordtracker:

“The only point I’d like to raise is that Wordtracker’s data isn’t just 30 days old. While the US dataset goes back 365 days, new data is added every day, and this new data is between 16 and 30 hours old when it hits the servers.”

Old blogs seldom updated and seldom kept up will suffer and cry mercy to blogs that are updated every day – even if only updated by lesser knowledgeable people. This seems to be the iPhone Generation’s thirst for information at rapid speed. It’s unfortunate though because it does seem that older, quality information will be sacrificed at the face of “Real Time Search”.

#2. Cloud computing will really take off

Google’s new algorithm has been reported by several people to be dramatically impacted by speed. Which is one reason they’re putting out all kinds of tools to help webmasters speed up their sites. Now, no matter what you do, on a shared host your going to have slowdowns. Not having a nearby server in your area, is going to cause slowdowns… The only answer for total speed, is… The cloud.

#3.  Frequently updating old content matters more

According to a report by Mashable (known more for their social media news than their SEO news), even those slight updates like an old article with no change other than updating the death toll number on an earthquake report can quickly shoot up higher than other articles.

#4. Opt-in list matters more now than ever

As social media climaxes in 2010 being the ultimate interruption to workforces and to personal lives, email remains our old dear friend. A way to stay in touch with those with less computer skills, internet savvy skills and online Bravado. It’s also an excellent marketing tool and unshaken by Google movements and algo updates and unmoved by PPC costs.. The ultimate in online insurance. According to Pew Internet, email remains the top activity online to this day.

#5. Viral marketing campaigns

You’d better still be creating purple cows in 2010… But you should avoid the mistakes you made with the purple cows in 2009… Like not making it DEADLY easy to pass your purple cows along to friends via Facebook, Twitter and Email a friend buttons on your pages/site. Like telling the right people in the industry with popular sites, twitter accounts and facebook fan pages ABOUT your purple cow with the right language…

I could predict more – but lets leave it there for now – very interesting…

If you don’t understand something that I’ve written but desperately need assistance in some area, drop me a line. dano@answerswanted.com – I might not be available over the holidays tho.

Google Caffeine Timeline – Leading up to Launch

That sums up where we’re at today, and – if you had time to read every article, you’d basically get the gist of why it’s called caffeine and what they’re planning to do — but i’ll spare you the reading.

Google Caffeine Overview:

• What does Caffeine do? Keep you alert!
  Google’s plan is to index search at a more real-time pace. I used to tell clients 4-6 weeks before rankings would really start to develop and that may have to change much sooner. Real time results isn’t just about Twitter either, it’s about blogs now beginning to have a bit more authority than they used to have.
• What was holding them back before?
  The file system was under a heavy load, the spidering was slower and the index held less information. Hence the invention of Google’s new file system GFS2 (Google File System 2)
• What’s New in Caffeine?
  Bigger Index – Google now holds more data than in the past.
  Faster Indexing – Google now gets current events quicker than ever before.
  Ranking Update? – Slightly higher authority of sites that are being updated more often than others. Blogs get more authority, but also get held more accountable for their approved comments & spam links.. Both posted on other sites and on your own site.  Other than that 90% of rankings stay exactly the same according to Summit Media’s Report after checking over 9,000 search keywords.

What should you be doing BEFORE the holidays are over to ensure a smooth transition and continued business into the new year? Quite simple… Here’s a easy to follow checklist to help you be prepared for the Caffeine update.

• Check all comments on your blogs & websites for any approved content linking to spam websites.
• Ensure your plan in 2010 is to update content more regularly & quickly even minor edits will help.
• Look out for a potential slap if you’ve gotten text content links from other blogs that were nothing to do with your community or niche market.
• If you haven’t already, sign up for Twitter and try and get into Google News and constantly update your material.

If any of your SEO friends tell you that the big ranking change in the New Year is a response to BING’s real-time search? Tell them straight up that you know for a fact GFS2.0 file system and the next generation larger index and faster indexing has been on the horizon since before Bing’s launch.

If any of your SEO friends tell you that Matt Cutt’s warning ” …but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.” as some kind of signal that this update is HUGE and will change EVERYONE’s rankings, they’re sadly mistaken. Fact is that Google wouldn’t be creating any friends by announcing a new algorithm during the Christmas retail season and Google does serve BOTH users and webmasters whether you choose to see it that way or not. Plus, not launching Caffeine durring the holidays is probably only 50% “doing it for the webmasters” and more like 50% because of Google’s yearly winter code freeze that happens every year anyway.. Which is why we saw so many new features launch in the last few weeks.

I hardly had the time to write this detailed post, for those who know me. But – I’m hoping to take the stress off everyone and educate those who wanna know more about this impending update.

Post your comments! I invite all conversation to this blog

Daniel J Deyette