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A few years ago, SEO was far more robotic than it is today. In fact, if you wanted to rank for some of the top keyphrases, you didn’t have to care much about being social in your niche or even standing out as an authority. You could simply buy directory links, sponsor blog posts, and even have WordPress themes developed which included a link to your site in the footer.
These days however, things are very different. The top results for most keyphrases are either a Wikipedia page, a site that is very focused around community, or a clear leader in an industry. There are exceptions, but links tend to go to social sites (even Wikipedia has social aspects) by the people who use them.
SEO now is far less robotic, and far more social. Based on this, I knew it was going to be a challenge to rank for two competitive keyphrases in my industry when I was a total nobody. Yet, I still managed to do it, and I’m going to show you exactly how.
Analyse the Search Volume
The first step you need to do before trying to rank for any keyphrase in Google, is to find out how many people are searching for it. It’s completely pointless being number one in Google for “dog umbrellas” if nobody is typing it into the search box and looking to keep their dogs dry in the rain.
To save you a lost of wasted time, head over to the Google Keywords tool. This tells you how many people are searching for keywords or keyphrases each month. I recommend you change the settings to All Countries and Territories, and from Broad to Exact on the top right hand side of the page.
I knew that the main theme for my niche was ‘personal development’ so that’s exactly what I typed in first. The tool showed me how many people searched for that phrase, and lots of other relevant terms I might want to try and rank for as you can see in the screenshot below:
Ideally, because I knew I was going to give myself at least 6 months to try and rank for a phrase, I wanted to pick a phrase that received a high number of searches. This meant I would probably end up picking a more competitive phrase, but it would be worth it in the end.
I then searched for other relevant words like ‘self help’ and ‘self improvement’ and while self help received far more searches, I later found it to be way too competitive for my liking. I liked the look of the first two keyphrases:
- Personal Development (33,100)
- Personality Development (33,100)
Once I had found two keyphrases that I think would bring regular, relevant traffic to my site, I decided to check how competitive they were.
Check the Competition
This step is to simply find out how difficult it is to rank in Google for the terms I want to rank for. I’m only going to get a good portion of those thousands of searchers if I’m somewhere in the top 5 results. If my site is back on page 2, I would only get a trickle of search traffic each day. If you don’t know already, the major factor which defines where a page ranks on Google is the number of backlinks that the site / page has. Backlinks are simply hyperlinks from one page to another, like me linking to my about page in this sentence.
My next step was to find out how many backlinks the top searches for this page had. Here are the steps involved:
- Search for your desired keyphrase in Google
- Take the URL of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd results
- Head on over to Yahoo as it is far better at showing links than Google
- Type (without quotes): “link:oneofyourURL’sgohere -site:thedomain.com“
- Write down the number of results that Yahoo shows
Note for step 4 that after -site: you type the domain name. So, if a result for personal development was johndoe.com/personal-development, that would be my URL, but “johndoe.com” would be after -site:
Run this 5 step process for all of your keyphrases and you should have a good idea of how many backlinks it will take to rank for them.
Decide on Your Final Keyphrase
If the top three sites all have tens of thousands of backlinks, it’s unlikely I’m going to try and outrank them as that could take me years. If they have a few thousand, on the other hand, I still might give things a try. I don’t believe that I can get thousands of links to my site (although, saying that, PluginID has 11,000) but I do believe I can get far better quality links than my competition.
Google not only ranks sites based on the number of links they have, but the quality and relevance. For example, it’s far better to have links to your site with ‘Personal Development‘ as the anchor text, rather than something like ‘Glen’s web site’. I knew I could get a lot of links with my desired anchor text so decided to go for it.
Personality Development looked like it would be far easier to rank for than Personal Development, so instead of just choosing one keyphrase, I decided to go for two. That is how I ended up trying to rank for 66,000 visitors worth of keywords.
On-Site SEO
There are two aspects to Search Engine Optimisation: on site and off. The first step is to make your site relevant to the keyphrase you are trying to rank for. Therefore, I put the keyphrase, Personal Development, in my:
- Website title
- Logo alt tag
- Navigation bar
- Footer (which linked back to my homepage)
Some people like to go a bit over the top with on-site SEO, but I personally don’t waste my time. On-site SEO probably makes up about 10% of rankings whereas backlinks make up the majority so that is where I wanted to spend my time. As long as I have the basics in place, I often find that it is enough.
I don’t think it’s wise to try and optimise your entire site for multiple keyphrases, so instead I created a blog post on the topic of personality development. This was an in-depth guide covering the subject which I believed would attract a lot of backlinks. It did attract some naturally, but not enough.
Building Backlinks
Whatever it is that you’re trying to rank for, this is where the hard work will come in. I’m someone who is willing to put the work into whatever I do, but I also like to kill two birds with one stone, where possible. Based on that, my plan was simple: I would grow my blog by writing guest posts for other blogs, and link back to my website with my desired anchor text links.
That was it.
I didn’t focus on directory submissions, forum links, paid links, article directories, or anything of the sort. I decided I would keep my strategy simple and try to write on as many websites as I could. It was going to take a lot of work to write enough articles for other blogs to make this work but once again: I’m someone who is willing to put the work in.
Below I have screenshotted some examples of the ‘footers’ of my guest posts:
I have written over 30 of these things so I won’t keep posting the screenshots, but I’m sure you get the idea. Even if this was not going to help me rank for the keyphrases, my guest posts allowed thousands of new readers to find my websites. There’s certainly nothing unethical about this either, unlike many SEO tactics, as I’m giving the authors free quality content for their website which took me hours to write.
Because of the work I did here, I rank in the top 10 of Google.com for both of these keyphrases. Note that the results fluctuate a lot (depending on datacentres, etc), but you should see me there.
In Summary
In reality, I ranked for far more visitors worth of keyphrases from the thousands of keywords I rank for, but I wanted to show you two examples that I purposefully focused on and how I did it. Thanks to my good friend Ali for being the inspiration for the blog post who will soon be ranking for millions of dollars worth of keywords.
If this sees like a lot of work, then ask: how much is thousands of highly targeted visitors to your website worth to your business?
My guess, is quite a lot.
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Brilliant post Glen. A fantastic achievement considering you stayed away from the usual directories etc. How receptive did you find people to allowing you to guest post considering you were an unknown in the industry? And how much of a rapour did you have to build up possibly before approaching? i.e. 3-4 email exchanges, a couple of retweets etc.?
Hey buddy, thanks!
In the majority of cases, the bloggers already had pages on their site indicating that they accepted guest posts. For others, I simply sent an email and asked if they would be interested in having me write an article for them.
In about three cases, i simply sent off the article (as I knew they had guest posts) without any prior contact. if what you write is good enough, it should get posted.
I wonder why do you suggest we do YAHOO back-link competitive research since we mainly aim for Google rankings & listings. Wouldn’t be smarter/targeted to look up competitors on Google?
Yahoo show more backlinks.
Thanks for this article Glen, don’t know if I’m supposed to do the same now for my website on personal development
Well, you only changed the title of your site after I wrote about this originally 3 months ago.
I guess the ‘problem’ with posts like this is that people just copy what I do instead of finding their own angle. For example, Diggy is trying to rank for ‘self improvement’ which will bring him relevant visitors and not put him in direct competition with me.
Feel free to go ahead, but try to carve out your own angle instead of just following what I’ve done.
Yes, I remember that post and I’ve tried to experiment some SEO for some websites, but I’ve done next to nothing for my blog. Anyways you wrote some good tips here and I want to try them, even if I’ll probably choose another keyword, more in line with that I write.
Good luck buddy!
Let me know if I can help
Sweet post Glen. Funny how I just published a post about keyword optimization at the same time. Yours kills mine
But, it’s only been a week for me, and looking at the number of backlinks, I should be able to easily reach the #1 position for one of my target keywords in no time.
Fantastic, fantastic post. Thanks Glen!
Don’t be crazy man! Your post comes from a very different perspective and is awesome
Glad you enjoyed it!
Hi Glen -
Thanks for the info here. This is very helpful and I’m glad you’ve continued this blog.
Do you typically optimize every post you do this way, or was your key focus on getting highly targeted traffic to your website for your main two keywords and then traffic would organically snowball from there (e.g. people reading your posts, sharing, etc.)?
Hey Nate,
No problem, I’m glad you’re enjoying the content. No, I never write blog posts just for search engines. In 126 blog posts on PluginID only two were written to try and get a lot of search engine traffic.
Thanks for this Glen
.
You explain things in an easy to understand way – it’s really interesting to find out how these things work and will be very useful to use for my site. I’ll have a think about how to utilise this info – I am pondering the angle I am coming at my blog from at the moment, so when I have got clearer on that I will decide on keywords.
Thanks again
Jen
Hey Jen,
You’re welcome, thanks for your comment. Do let me know on what you decide.
Glen, I haven’t been to your site in a while but this post reminded me why I need to stop by more often. Always a pleasure to read your stuff.
Thank you Andrew, hope to see you here in the near future
Hey Glen, really loved this post. It was my first considering I just subcribed to your blog yesterday and purchased your eBook as well, which has been well worth it. I plan on spending WAY too much time on your site in the coming weeks, but no doubt it’ll be well worth it. Keep it coming!!
Awesome Marcus, thank you!
Can’t wait to see you back here
“Some people like to go a bit over the top with on-site SEO, but I personally don’t waste my time. On-site SEO probably makes up about 10% of rankings whereas backlinks make up the majority so that is where I wanted to spend my time. As long as I have the basics in place, I often find that it is enough.”
I take a similar approach as you (in terms of not going overboard with on-site stuff) and it has worked well for me.
Definitely. Unless you’re working on a complex shopping cart system or something like that, on-site shouldn’t take up too much of your time.
Especially on systems like WordPress where most of the important stuff is easy to implement.
Nice to see you here, Steven!
Great post Glen!
These are the secrets of the Jedi Master! THanks for sharing, I’ve started to implement them too, and already ranking on page 3 for ‘Self-Improvement’
Cheers ! (Tweeted and spuhnn)
Yep, proud of you man.
Haha, Jedi master. Kinda relevant you saying that since I am your father.
Ciao!
Glen,
Nice post. Nothing better than getting SEO tips from a SEO guy (or should I call you SEO/Personal Development guy?).
I’ll add my tip:
You can find new keywords and rank for them. And what more you can do is, check your traffic stats and see the keywords that are already getting you traffic. If you are number one for that keyword, leave it. If you are not in the first position, you’ve found a gem. You’ll be getting approximately 43% more traffic by being in the first position than being in the second according to stats I saw few months back at DailyBlogTips.Com.
So for getting a couple of backlinks, you’re getting extra traffic. If you can do that for many keywords, how much would traffic increase?
Cheers
Hey Ram, Good to see you here buddy
You can just call me “The MAN”
Yeah I think those statistics sounds about right. Traffic would increase substantially if I just moved up one or two places.
Great post, this just confirms the fact that within content links on relevant sites are the most powerful. I was wondering if you could share your techniques for finding blogs that accept guest posts? If it’s not something you can share I understand.
Great post for us noobs- keep em coming!
Thanks Kristen,
Will do!
Ah, so the secret master reveals his scroll of legendary SEO techniques.
Duly noted, Glen. Thanks a bunch.
Haha, you should write a novel
Cheers buddy
- Glen
Great Resource right here! That is amazing how you ranked so high with just keeping your SEO tactics very simple. Sometimes simplicity is king and you proved it right there. Way to go!
This is definitely quality information that needs to be presented. Most people think that getting ranked for keywords with a lot of competition is hard. It is hard when you don’t know what increases your backlinks and how to properly hyperlink your keywords
It’s not difficult (probably a better word) but it was hard. I put in countless hours of work to get those links
Hi Glen,
Nothing unique about my flagship blog, I came across several bloggers who blogged on blogging and who were very successful. This concept had a great deal of appeal to me so….. I blatantly out and out copied them. I have learned a lot and it looks like the blog is beginning to gain some traction.
I find it very interesting that you chose one method of marketing – guest posts. I can understand why. The one time that I had a guest spot on a prominent blog I got an immediate uptick of visitors. As I do write a good number of original articles for submission to article directories, maybe the time would be better served if those articles were submitted to blog owners. Question, typically, how long a time interval should you allow for a submitted guest article to either be published or declined before sending it off to someone else? …………and the obvious question that goes begging here: will you be publishing guest posts?
Hi Valentina,
I’m here to help people to succeed so I’m honest, but right now, I don’t see your blog going anywhere.
You have a plain theme, barely any original (remarkable / unique) content and I see your posts are getting no comments.
Have you thought about writing on a topic you actually love? Something you actually know about?
Hi Glen,
Thank you for the feedback. Yeah! I just used a template for the theme, maybe just a blank header would be better – I heard somewhere that plain sites are more profitable.
This site is less than a year in the making. I changed domain names, redirected (should have redirected the new one to the old one) and changed platforms – my “followers” did not transfer from Blogger to here.
Your points are taken well … the occasional comment is not going to bring a rushing stream of traffic. The thing is, I really do enjoy doing this particular blog (I have 9 others which are performing nominally better and are in the money – they are grouped and evenly split between making money and dog related). I read somewhere else that the first year is the killer – mine is just about there. I am seeing now where the blog is beginning to take on traction, and increase in backlinks (still a long way to go from the original blog – this is another thing that did not follow the transfer as I redirected the wrong domain).
I know its not unique … but I’m going to invest another year to see where it is headed.
Yeah…. comments. I am hoping that with increased traffic those too will increase.
Thank you once again for the feedback. So appreciated.
Wishing you continued success ………….valentina
Hello Valentina,
I’m a newcomer to blogging, so my knowledge is still quite limited. I read the reply Glen left for you first comment. I’m not sure if you have changed the layout of your site since November 2, 2009 (the date of comment I’m replying to), but I can see what Glen is talking about. Like I said I am not a SEO expert, but I do know what would keep me exploring the site – the design. Although, you may have some quality post (I have yet to read one), the layout is does not make it an easy read. My suggestion as reader (not a blogger)/regular ol’ visitor:
1. Change the font on your site. Make it more readable.
2. Be consistent with the font you use. I see various fonts on the your site that are used, which gives the appearance of a not well maintained site.
3. Maybe, add some line spacing for your paragraphs.
4. Try deceasing the width of content so the reader does not have to scan almost the entire width of the computer screen to read you post.
5. And, I would really consider adding a “Read More” link to each of your post on the home page. It would give your site a cleaner look. More of your content would be near the top of the page, which would make it easier for me, as a visitor, to see your other content.
After summing up all all of this for, I just have realized what it’s all about…”Readers are Lazy”… make easy for people to get to more content with less amount of work (i.e. mouse scrolls, keyboard strokes). I really hope these tips will be beneficial to you in the near future.
P.S. I’m going to send a copy of this comment to you on your website in case your not tracking this article anymore.
Some additional tips:
Use a Firefox plugin to see easily how many links the competitors in Google have (SEO Quake or SEO for Firefox), no need to manually go to yahoo.
Also it shows other factors such as pagerank, age of the domain, indexed pages, etc.
That way you’ve got a much faster and completer picture of the competition.
Now if you see lots of strong domains ranking with many backlinks (like in your blogpost-example) I would check the anchor texts from those sites using majesticseo.com (not free) and linkdiagnosis.com (free).
Choosing which keywords you want to rank for is the basis for all SEO, if you don’t do it right, the rest of the hours you make will be much less efficient.
Hi Glen.
Chris from speakers club here (we miss you man!) Sorry mate I am trying to do the backling check on my site using yahoo. Got Cloudliving open and typing it in exactly the same link:http://www.yourmindmovie/index.php -site:yourmindmovie.co.uk (One of your templates) Has Yahoo changed and no longer shows the number of backlinks or am I doing something wrong? I wanted to check after spending all that money after going to bookmarkingdemonhq
Thanks
Chris
Great post. I really liked the clear quality of your writing, Glen. Spot on.
I like your point of really going after something with a lot of traffic. Too often SEO help like this puts start-up bloggers off. I like you positive take on this.
Best wishes,
Jon
Nice article Glen; what I’ve found is a great way to rank quickly in a keyword is through the domain. There might not be many personal_development.com domains left but if you’re only looking for keyword rank and not brand-building then this is a top method
WOW!!! Great content Greg. Thanks for providing relevant SEO info. that new SEO marketers can use. It’s people like you who help people like me to be successful without having to pay $1k’s of dollars just to get useful importnant strategic SEO knowledge. I diffinitely will be sharing your site with others to increase your rankings even further.
Blessings,
JW Rhodes
Hey this is a nice looking blog, I was just looking for this the other day. Pleased I finally discovered what I wanted.
I am getting ready to launch my blog chronicling my journey from the dreaded workaholic who was away from home for 16 hours each day to working from home. A few years ago I was working a lot just to make ends meet and due the hours away due to my 2hr commute and 10-12hr workdays; my kids were missing me and said those words: “Daddy work fom home…”:
I start my journey 01 January 2010. I am following your SEO advice and seeing there are more sites for working from home jobs than how-to’s. Any advice?
Hey, I followed you URL and went straight to a parked domain. Wondering if you’re still continuing your journey? I was interested after reading this comment.
Good for you man… you gained links by simply doing guest posts? It’s good to see people work hard and get the results they’re looking for.
Good article. appreciate your advice. I have launched my website in December 17 and awarded by Ezine as Platinum Expert Author, from there I got many free traffic. I have also done press release & get some traffic from there too. But I do not have any page rank yet, how do i get a rank from Google and how do i get links from other high page rank sites?
Thank you very much
[...] you guys new ways to get traffic to your site. For example, I wrote this post on how I rank for 66,000 visitors worth of keywords on Google and the lessons behind the most popular blog posts (in terms of links) on some big blogs. [...]
[...] you need for free. For those that are just starting, I highly recommend you check out this excellent keyword research article by Glen of Viperchill – I am now using a similar strategy to this for evaluating keywords and [...]
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Excellent article, Glen…as usual. I like the fact that you added “-site: thedomain.com” to the the link command. I am assuming that this is to remove the internal links from the count. Another Viperchill post for my bookmarks. Thanks.
I personally rank well for twitter icons for a collection posts. I think its the keywords and the links. And you are right, links don’t come to you, just like that. I am building links for my blog at this time
good post, I really have a hard time picking keywords and deciding if I can rank well for them..
Glen, Another great post. How did the links help your site? Did you notice a significant difference in your search engine rankings?
Hi Matt,
Yes, I did. Links are 95% of what matters when it comes to rankings.
yeah viper chill–good info. Almost bought Cloud Living–almost, tempted, but I spend a lot on books. Maybe some bundled “free e-reports” would have pushed me over the edge. I find that after the initial pitch, it helps to “overwhelm” the prospect with bonus material–so much so that they can justify the purchase.
Not that I don’t think the product is worth the price (I usually don’t even read the free stuff given with info products–it just makes me feel better about spending money, I like to see it there, still unread months later–the value still working)–its just a thought, by one who got away.
consumer insight or something.
thanks, I will be back.
Hi! I really enjoy read your articles. I am reading your blog whenever I have free time
Once again thanks for all your efforts. I took the time to read in between the lines because i am really struggling with SEO, different people have different versions of what works and i’m just trying to pick out what is relevant. I do hope you reply this comment because i’ll like answers to some questions just for clarification:
I realized the search figure you quoted was that of Local search, my first question is which of the figures should we work with, that of the Local Search or the ‘Global Search’?
I don’t understand what you meant by “Run this 5 step process for all of your keyphrases and you should have a good idea of how many backlinks it will take to rank for them”.
I have read it in some places that we should pick our top keywords in the list (seven) not just one and list it outright as categories, now you said, ‘focus on a keyword phrase’, does that mean a site will do better if it focuses on a keyword phrase instead of phrases? or you mean we should focus on a primary keyword we wish to rank for and use it for our backlinks anchor text?
Is it neccessary to check for the number of pages currently available for that keyword phrase by imputting quotes in between keyword phrases in google?
Please i look forward to your guidelines
Glen, once again thank you for your read, and thank you to the commenters also. There is a great benefit to reading a post a few months the down the road, comments can give some great advice also.
Time for me to share my little tip: Similar to what @BajaCa said about the Firefox plugins to check a website’s data, if you’re using Google Chrome, like myself, install the “SEO Chrome” extension. It will provide you with some helpful data when you’re trying to decipher what makes a site rank.
Glen, i have spent over 2 days reading all the post on your blog….you are doing a great job…;
lessons learnt …plan out what you want to rank for and work at it by building back links to your blog and doing on site seo stuff..
use the word to be ranked for as anchor text
thanks
Hi Glen, I’m working my way through your posts. You’re really given me some great ideas. In particular, I’m enjoying the well written quality of your articles. I had been copying the format of many of the other blogs I’ve seen with short 3-4 paragraph posts, but I enjoy your articles much more.
It’s also clear that you get good responses from your articles from the number of comments that you get.
Hi Glen,
Really fantastic site you have here – I found it at the perfect time as I’m about to start my own blog and want to learn the right way about going about things.
One question I do have for you regarding this process, just how important do you feel it is to have keywords in the domain? Let’s say you have the choice between a keyword rich domain that you could potentially rank for (longer tail) or a more catchy, marketable domain name that people would likely remember (brandable) that does include keywords but they’re ultra competitive.
Which would be the better route to go with? I feel like I”m stuck between a rock and a hard place because part of me says go with the keyword domain for SEO but it just sounds long and drawn-out and not that interesting.
My other options sound cool and exciting.
Any thoughts would be great. Thanks in advance.
Great post Glen. I have been thinking about trying to rank for some more searched keywords but I never was really motivated until now. I think I will start right away because I already have the keyword in mind.
Awesome work, Glen.
I was totally expecting you to say something along the lines of, “I posted tons of articles to content websites,” since this is what many SEO marketers do to increase their search engine rankings. I had no idea that you could rank well for a keyword phrase like personal development by just guest posting alone. That’s amazing!
But I guess it does make sense. If you choose the sites you guest post on wisely, the quality of your backlinks will be a lot better than if you were just to post articles on content sites.
I have a question: It only took about 30 guest posts to achieve your goal? I would imagine that it would take way more backlinks. Or, was the majority of your backlinks coming from site visitors?
Once again, awesome post Glen.
Christina
Brilliant post! First post I’ve actually read on here, surely it won’t be the last. Glad to have found your blog. I actually tried doing that Yahoo trick of yours but it didn’t work-out for me. I am a big fan of Market Samurai myself, do you ever use that or do you just go by this method alone?
Anyhow, hope all is well (And happy belated new year!)
Happy new year man. This post is fantastic and I’ve learned some stuffs there in. I guess there are other stuffs we also want from you that you aint doing yet and I suggest you hire a personal assistant sort of online personal assistant to help you more so that more people can get to learn from you
I could be of help if you decide to get one.
Keep doing the great work and we are solidly behind you.
Sheyi
i know we have to select keywords and use google adwords tool for that
but still its a mystery for me