My wife decides to put together a website (first one) about a hobby that she enjoys. She buys a really lousy no-name graphical web designer that basically creates embedded tables for everything. The resulting code is horrible. She creates around 15 or so pages of how-tos, charts, examples, etc for her hobby. Mind you, there is no research or thought to targeting any specifc keywords. There's no formatting to lure the search engines. It's just information that she thinks might be useful to other people. She publishes the site and we pay someone to submit it to 350 directories. That's all. She does not update the site. After a few months her site now ranks on the first page of Google for several keyphrases. One phrase puts her at #4. Now these aren't blockbusters like "ringtones" or anything, but they do bring her several hundred uniques a day. And what's more, the average page views per visit is 5, with most visitors staying for several minutes and more. We're trying to figure out how she wants to try to monitize the site now. I guess there is a place for a little luck in SEO.
I do not think its luck Creating unique and original content is far more important than SEO. Your wife has did the right thing:
Congratulations. But remember is not always luck that made your site on top of the SERP but you've mentioned you've made unique content. Thats why you are ranking now on SERP. As they always said "Content is King". If you offer something worth reading and linking its not a big surprise to me that you will rank high in SERP. The bottomline is "Luck is'nt enough" You've made good content thats why you're ranking.
Yeah, you folks are right about the original content. It's when I see something like this that I realize just how true that is. I'm amused at my wife's nonchalance over what she accomplished. She wanted to try making a website ... she did ... and now she's on to her latest area of interest.
You should research how those keywords pay in AdSense and other advertising venues. I assume it's a pretty niche market? Becuase a couple hundred uniques a day isn't too much, but if these keywords pay $3 per click or something, that's some mad moola right there.