The other day, I was thinking of some exact match domains that ranked well and remembered the time when I was searching how to bake a potato (sounds simple right? but someone like myself can destroy a kitchen doing the simplest of things :-D). Anyway, I remembered clicking the first link to come up in my search, which was HowToBakeAPotato (dot) com. I looked up the stats and sure enough, 27k googlers search this exact match question every month. How to bake a fucking potato....a simple ONE PAGE SITE with NO GRAPHICS....just text, adsense and photos of how to bake a fucking potato! The Google Insights stats are beautiful! Alexa stats aren't too bad either, ranking at 536,331. BUT what I find most interesting is this: When I search the following terms in google, howtobakeapotato (dot) com still ranks incredibly well! - "Bake Potato": #1 - "how potato": #8 - "how bake": #3 (wtf??) - "potato bake": #6 - "BAKE": #11 <<===== fuckin amazing.....This shitty, one page site is #11 for the search "BAKE" ....i mean, you can bake ANYTHING, but this site about potatos still comes up at number 11??? Beautiful! - And lastly "potato" ranks #19 Forgive me being a newbie and all (something I'm not ashamed to admit), but that's fucking amazing! :-D At the bottom of the site the author also has links to "how to open a coconut" and other common exact match websites. Someone's found his niche! My question for you guys(n gals) is, besides the site being an exact match domain, what other SEO tricks did the author of this site do to rank? The only other thing that I noticed besides it being an exact match is that the site has 48 backlinks....which isn't even that much compared to the other competitors with similar sites.... Could it be that the site is older than it's competition? I have no idea how to find out how old the site is to be honest... WHAT AM I MISSING? Anyway, this site inspired me to go looking HARD as hell to find my niche and I found it! Now I've got 10 exact match domains from 12k to 50k adding up to a total of about 270k exact match searches a month. My next step is to figure out the "how to bake a potato" :-D -----------IMPORTANT------------- P.S. Moderators, please don't ban me! I've seen a lot of that going on here. I swear this is not spam for that site as I do not own and am not affiliated with the site mentioned in this post in any way (which is why I didn't link it). I'm honestly just trying to figure out how I can learn more on how to SEO my own exact match domains in a similar way.
Interesting post I am at the same point. Wanting to learn a lot more about SEO. Seems like you're off at a good start with the 270k exact searches. How is it going so far in terms of traffic and ranking to your site? I'm still a newbie to SEO too, but so far with my experience I know that a lot of it is based on keyword density on the page as well as title text and header(h1 text). Then there's the off-page stuff like backlinks. I still have so much more to learn though.
The website is 6 years old, but that have nothing to do about it's rank, the trick here is the domain name it self, exact keyword, each word separated give more power to the keyword next to it, so "potato" will bring "bake" up, I don't know how to explain this but in my old times I used to stick "cow" with "car" in a page that ranks good for cows, after a few months the keyword car will start ranking well for the same page. so it's natural. search google for "how" the first result will be "howdesign dot com", why this particular "how" ranked? because people often search for "how to design+something". I don't know if you understood what I mean, but this is the maximum explanation I can give XP
I understand that! Awesome! So kind of auto-associates your website with what people often search for? Kind of? lol
kind of , hmm yeah auto-associates your keyword with the one you stuck on it, and makes them both go higher thing XP