I have a blog with articles that aren't ranking the selected keywords and was hoping some people would be willing to share what has worked (or not worked) for them. I'll go first. I have a experienced but very busy partner who selected phrases with 400-800 searches a month and reasonably non-completive phrases with ~100,000 - 4,000,000 Google results. Some of the competing pages currently have above 300 links from internal pages and under 50 from external pages. My pages are written to fit keyword phrases and are primarily informational which should be fairly easy to link to. They are also optimized on page fairly well. Several articles (~15%) have been spun and submitted to a private farm of pr0 websites and blogs with one, maybe two links back to the original article. I have also done a token amount of manual postings in relevant forums. I recently posted a link to my site in Wikipedia as well. My results: Several pages rank in the top hundred results and get 40-80 inbound visits a month from Google. None of the pages rank for the chosen phrases. The forum postings give me a about 40 visitors a month which for the time I put in is pathetic. Wikipedia gives me ~100 visits a month and is worth gaining more relevant links that probably will not be removed. However I am a long ways away from ranking for what I want to. What combination of strategies have you used and with what results? Anybody commenting on their overall combination of linking tactics would be greatly appreciated. Joe Jensen
Actually I have a pretty easy linking tactic (if you may call it one!). I use my desired keyphrases/keywords in the anchor texts that link to my site. Focus my link building mainly on one way links from directories, reciprocal links from content sites, and deep linking through article submission. Hope that helps!
that's the way and minimize exposure to link exchanges. One bad partner can burn your PR in a day if your not well established. So if your competition has 300 inbound links (you need to match that) &you need to determine if you can convert enough of the traffic to make it worth while.
Yes, DEFINITELY, pay attention to who you are linking to, because that's something you control. Not because you got a request from someone you immediately accept, do a background check first.
If you go here: Free Website Valuation you will be able to get the sites details including pagerank, alexa rank, and the number of linkbacks
How much time do you typically allow? When you submit articles do you use article farms, normal public directories, or a combination? I'm also curious how many farms you use and if you try to use one article (which I assume you spin first) for more than one article/page of yours. I find it interesting because your strategy isn't all that different from mine & I am not successful.
Another site for a free background check is the following... submitawebsite.com/seo-tools/domain-trust.html whats good about submitawebsites tool is that you can actually compare competeing websites in terms of all the parameters including alexa ratings, pr, landing in the serps, and a few other very useful ones. Check it out and let me know if it was helpful at all.