Hi all! I would like to share my experience in SEO & online promotion in this thread and it would great if you share yours too ! http://hasya-kavita.blogspot.com is one blog, for which I have being receiving good organic traffic. Some interesting facts about this blog is : 1. It is ranked on first page of almost every search engine for keywords related to its niche - like funny Hindi poems, hasya (hasya in Hindi means 'humor/funny stuff') , hasya kavita (funny poems) etc. 2. The blog has been active for over two years and it has still sustained its ranking. 3. More interestingly, there is hardly any content on this blog! I have converted the poems of famous Hindi poets in image format and have loaded them as posts, which meas that the content is not unique either ! My conclusion from the work, which I have done on this blog is that what Google values is: a) The domain name (hasya-kavita is a keyword which brings hundreds of visitors daily on this blog) b) Its age - I attained the rankings after about 10 months since I made this blog, make it a year ... c) Keywords in the title, description and tags - Interestingly, this is the only textual content that I have on this blog! The poems are in image format ad therefore are not indexed by Google (apart from their tags!) Some other observations are : 1. You need not to have a .com or any other TLD domain to get rankings. 2. Its not necessary to have 'unique' content to get rankings (this is not recommended though !) 3. You can rank you site even without link building - I haven't done any link building on this blog! Feel free to share your thoughts as well ! Cheers! Majaal
Majaal, it's good your blog is enjoying good traffic. However, it could be due to the fact that you're in a highly specific niche. Do you get a lot competition? I doubt it. Plus, your conclusion about the lack of necessity to have unique content on a blog/site is wrong. The opposite of unique content is duplicate content. Technically speaking, you don't have duplicate content on you blog, because you post images, not text, on it. Google can't read text off images, so it only consults URL name, titles and descriptions to understand what your blog is about. Plus, as you have not that much text, the percentage of keywords in that text is big (in other words, your keyword density is high). If you doubt it, you can check it with any onpage seo analysis software, but I bet it's big. Plus, you've been around for some 10 months, so it's kind of no surprise you're ranking.
Interesting thread. However, most of these keywords does not seem to have high competition. Its good that you get lots of visitors for them. Thats the beauty of niche blogs - low competition and if you can get things write, it can click quite well !
I think the poster is onto something. When you find a good niche, you can rank high. Of course, you also need enough traffic to make money.
Thanks everyone for sharing your opinions. I would again like to remind that this thread is based on my personal experience and I am just sharing it with all of you. You are free to agree or disagree with them. I speak of my experience and you speak of yours, sometimes it might sound contradictory, comets exactly polar, but then thats what the beauty of SEO is all about, you can expect the unexpected ! A place for everything and the scope is endless Feel free to share more of your experience in this thread. Cheers! Majaal
/Add : This is yet another example of keyword rich domain http://clinophobia.com Just the domain name was enough to get the first page ranking. The trick again was the niche, which does not have have any competition on paper. But, interesting the blog does receives a few hundred hits for it, which implies that the search ratio is much higher than what Google shows! Again it took around 6 months before the ranking started showing and the rank sustained once it was achieved, probably because their was no competition to counter thereafter. Another example o a well selected niche make ranking easy!