I recently read a post by someone asking for a quick answer on how he could get a site he was SEOing in the top 5 for ultra competitive gambling keywords. Super Keywords. The ones that make people a lot of money and thus are very valuable. Ranking for those keywords is VERY expensive and time consuming...there is no shortcut. Here is just some (but not all) of what it would take to rank for prime keywords in the gambling/porn/pharmaceutical industries: 1) Blog Farm Team - 2 or 3 full time staff people to run your blog farms. Each Blog farm would need to consists of over 50 elements and be made up of a mix of Web 2.0 and self-hosted sites (all self-hosted sites on different uniqe IP addreses and domain names registered with different registrars) Each full-time staff person would be in charge of their own 50 element blog farm and would need to work on it 8-10 hours per day including the promotional work. They feed all URLs for the various blogs posts that they make on the blog farm to the Bookmarking team. 2) Link Building Tools - $900 p/month for tools such as LinkVana, AMA, Link Juicer, Article Marketer and other automated tools that would help you build backlinks to each and every single post that is made on your 150 blog farm elements and any page on your money site. You will also need a bank of proxies which are reliable and which you can control for the bookmarking team. 3) Pay for Prime Forum Link Privileges - $2,000 - $3,000 p/month for prime forum posting abilities - in my niche, the top Forum has a package for $650 p/month which enables you to have four separate accounts with each account allowed to have outbound links to your site in the signature. Only sponsors can have signature links. If you paid this much for 5 prime forums then you would be paying out $3,000+ p/month just for the ability to link from high-ranking relative forums. Note that you have not actually MADE any posts at this point. That's a separate cost. 4) Forum Posting/Blog Commenting Team - 3-4 full time staff people to post to the forums and do blog posts - now that you are ALLOWED to post to the forums you have to have people on staff for hours and hours p/day actually doing it. They need to save the URL for every thread or post they comment on and send it to your bookmarking team. 5) Content Team - 1-2 on-site people and 5-7 virtual people who will write and organize the content for your money site and blog farms. You order content from your authors and your on-site people clean it up and post it to your money site on a consistent basis to build up the actual money site itself. Other batches of content are forwarded to the Blog Farm team who's job it is to spin the articles and put them on the various blog farm elements. All of these blog posts, once they go live had the URLs for the various articles/blog posts fed to the bookmarking team. 6) Bookmarking Team - 2 full time staff people for bookmarking - these two people will run a bank of 5 to 10 computers that are setup for bookmarking. They will rotate between creating bookmarking accounts at hundreds of different bookmarking sites and loading up pages for bookmarking runs that are fed to them from the forum team, blog farm team, and the content team. They will launch the bookmarking runs whenever 50 new elements are ready to be bookmarked. They'll use the proxies you bought to hide your bookmarking tracks. You can see that this type of operation means that you'll be paying out well over $100,000 in salary costs and about $22,000 in tools/proxies/hosting each and every year. You could probably break into the top 5 in 2 years or so, but you'd need to budget for 3 years of work before seeing big returns. So here's how the numbers add up: Pay your team of skilled, dedicated, reliable people who won't derail this freight train for 3 years = $360,000 Pay for tools/proxies/hosting for three years = $66,000 Pay yourself $50,000 p/year salary so you don't become distracted and derail your OWN train = $150,000 Total capital needed upfront to go after Super Keywords = $576,000 Of course, the money you can make on super-competitive keywords should dwarf this as you should be able to make 10x the amount you put in from a site sitting in the Top 3 for these terms.
I don't agree with you. There are easier more cost effective ways to get decent SERPS and even outrank competitors. I do agree that it will cost some money to beat the 'major players' but I don't agree with your logic as to overall cost.
If you use grey hat techniques you should be prepared for Google to slap you. When you're ranking top 3 for a super competitive keyword, that's gonna hurt pretty badly! Such grey hat techniques are probably best suited to low to medium competitive keywords, where you have lots of sites up in the top 3 on different IPs. If you're over-reliant on Google and you have no backup plan and no other source of traffic if you get slapped, you're not making the best use of your resources. An algorithm change that will wipe your site off the first page of the SERPs could be just around the corner.
"there is no shortcut" look I could do it on my own and without spending a dime. Of course I'd never do it with a brand new domain but with web 2.0, its a different story altogether... What I just said is a pretty bold statement, but any true SEO expert will know you can do this with web 2.0, blog commenting and profile links.
Time is money. If you do it yourself you need to count the cost of your own time. However, I do agree with you, $500,000 is a huge amount of money to spend to rank for even the most competitive keyword.
The principle is this: high risk, high return; low risk, low return. But some risks can be calculated. The above suggestion is risky but can't be calculated. Sorry.
I agree with "The Expert" in his link plan. I don't agree it would cost that much in labor. There are many internet and SEO people who use people from over seas to work for a lot less. Educated computer people are currently working full time in other countries for $700 a month. But it does take a huge effort. I personally would rather pay to do pay per click campaigns then to go through all this effort of years of trying to optimize for a keyword. You can get a ton of clicks for $500,000.