I have decided to document my attempts at dominating a niche here to help me learn and help other learn what is needed. Disclaimer: I am not an SEO professional. I know that the niche that I am after is not a giant one, nor is there a ton of profit potential, but it is a niche I am passionate about (and that is important). Back story: On May 28, 2009 I registered my domain, Zone9Garden.com. I intended to just document my attempts to grow a successful garden in USDA Hardiness Zone 9, and did not expect anybody to care about it. Well, after a few weeks of posting I started to get a few visitors and they started to ask questions so I started to evolve the blog to also include educational posts. Today, the site gets as much traffic from the educational posts as it does the simple posts about my garden. Goals: I have picked out 5 keyword phrases that I want to rank #1 on Google. With that ranking the site will be getting a fair amount of traffic that I can monatize a little and make a moderate profit from the site (which will just go right back into my garden). On my next post I will talk about my traffic to date and the keywords I am going to try to take over! Any/All comments are welcome and encouraged. If you have advice, that is welcome as well! Thanks in advance!
The Keywords I have figured out the 5 keywords I want to dominate. These 5 keywords are very niche specific and should not be difficult to get a number 1 ranking. Once I have number one on these 5 I will move on to bigger keywords! Here they are, followed by what I already rank (most first page) and how many other pages are found in the search: Keyword – Rank – Competition Vegetable Garden Blog – 12 – 18.2 million Zone 9 Gardening – 3 – 19.1 million Zone 9 Garden – 3 – 16.5 million Zone 9 Vegetables – 5 – 1.02 Zone 9 Planting Schedule – 4 – 1.3 Based on the rankings that I already have, I don’t think this should take too long or be extremely difficult! I will have to formulate a plan and will post it once I have. As always, any/all comments are welcome and encouraged. If you have advice, that is welcome as well! Thanks in advance!
dont forget onpage seo. I have a few recommendations: 1- I dont see an H1 tag, that should atleast contain "vegetable Garden blog" something like "Read This Great Vegetable Garden blog Daily" 2- I dont see anywhere, at least once, the words "vegetable garden blog" in your content. This should help. 3- Less important factor. know images are using the alt tag of "vegetable garden blog" I like to add alt tags to different image with different tag, so that main tag as not a density too high which could prevent proper ranking. 4- I dont see your keyword "vegetable garden blog" in your meta tag description. add it once or not as this is somewhat important but still helpful. If you want to try, make these changes, and check your page cache in google. Next time your page cache is updated, check daily the position of your keyword "vegetable garden blog", and see if it improves. Report here.
Changes so far. Description Tag Old: USDA Zone 9 offers year round gardening! Zone9Garden.com follows the gardening efforts of one man living in Central Florida! New: USDA Zone 9 offers year round gardening! Zone9Garden.com follows the gardening efforts of one man living in Central Florida! H1 Tags added: Added 2 H1 tags in the header of the blog. “Zone 9 gardening†“Vegetable Garden Blog†Alt Tags Added an alt tag to the blogs logo “Vegetable Garden Blog – Zone 9 Gardening†That is all for today… Will do more work tomorrow… As always, any/all comments are welcome and encouraged. If you have advice, that is welcome as well! Thanks in advance!
The Plan Since starting this I have made a few changes to the site (listed above) but I did so with out a plan. Now I am going to formulate a plan and track, in detail, my progress following through with the plan. I will be doing both on site and off site SEO. If you have any ideas to add to this plan, please do not hesitate to give suggestions! On Page SEO - Write headlines (H1 and H2 tags) on important posts - Rewrite first paragraph to be keyword rich and targeted on important posts - Add keyword rich ALT tags to images on important posts - Build more internal links - Link to a few relevant posts using 5 core keywords Off Site SEO - Blog Commenting - Forum Signatures - Build Social Media presence - Article Marketing - Talk Webmasters into linking to my site So far that is the plan. It is not the strongest SEO plan ever made, but it is a plan. As always, any/all comments are welcome and encouraged. If you have advice, that is welcome as well! Thanks in advance!
Today’s Efforts On Site SEO - Wrote a Post - “Zone 9 Vegetable Garden†in title and Heading (H1) - Post is Keyword rich - IMG Alt tags are Keyword Rich - Added H2 tag “Zone 9 Garden†site wide Off Site Link Building - Blog Commenting - “zone 9 gardening†3 links - “zone 9 garden†1 link - “vegetable garden blog†2 links - Forum Posting - “zone 9 garden†1 link - Twitter Post - 1 link not anchor text I also acquired a site wide link from a PR3 garden site in their blog roll (no link exchange, just a kind webmaster) I am taking my link building kind of slow so that it does not look spammy to Google or to the site owners who are moderating! As always, any/all comments are welcome and encouraged. If you have advice, that is welcome as well! Thanks in advance!
I found out that a recent upgrade of Wordpress caused major formatting issues with some older (and popular posts). I had to spend most of the day (after the post above) correcting to formattins issues. That should help reduce my bounce rate!