I am wondering what peoples thoughts are on this. Is it better to point all of your weight toward one really competitive term or is it better to point at say a dozen smaller terms?
How would you define "easy terms"? 3 word key terms? 2 word? Based on amount of results for the term? Amount of searches for the term (in the thousands or hundreds)? Etc. Personally, I target some fairly complicated terms, though I have about 25,000+ weight and while I've profited greatly because of it, I'm starting to think of a new strategy.
So do you point all of your weight to one or two really competitive terms? Is it enough to rank you well?
I meant competitive, not complicated in my post In any event, I point most of my weight to about 4 competitive terms that anchor my main keyword. Other than that, I have some other non-competitive keywords that I'm starting to focus on that have a about 10,000 searches a day. I say they're non-competitive with 10,000 searches simply because I've done some research on link data from the top guys in Google and noticed that the backlink data isn't very high (maybe a thousand links back at most).
I consider terms that are low for "allinanchor" but get decent searches (they do exist - usually outside the realm of affiliate sites though). I figure a COOP link is about 1/10 as good as a real link. If your goal is to improve rankings, then pushing a little weight to a lot of terms is a better way to go. I don't use my weight right now, but I had hit terms that had high search volume, but low competition. They were usually trendy words that come and go. Like I'd hit "smart spin" or "cold heat" or products that are pretty new and sell well, but are easy to get onto front page. Once the products die down, move it to something else and in the mean time get "real" links to those pages to keep the ranking steady. I see lots of COOP ads hitting words like "eharmony" or "ebay" - like they have a prayer of getting ranked (yeah, I know, DP's page was ranked for ebay a long time ago). So I wonder - why are they wasting that weight on a virtually impossible word? Its almost like doing seo for words like "SEO" or "gifts" or "porn" or something. Target something easier. Show results, get some traffic, then move on from there.
Well, eharmony and ebay are mostly Shawn terms (Shawn owns eterniti.com). But yeah, those kinds of terms are hard to outrank others for unless you have 50-100K+ weight.
I didn't know he ran that site There are tons of "ebay" ads that have popped up since then. eharmony too. I've seen others. I'd have to refresh my pages to get to them, but its striking how many ads are running and you search google and they are nowhere to be found in the top 100. Either bad pages or something. When I was running ads, if the word didn't appear to climb to a top 10 position in a good week or so, I figured it was time to move on. But that's me, I guess. Too results oriented.
Yeah, I'm very impatient, but noticed that Google usually works in 2 week cycles for the most part. I can put an ad up and put some good weight behind it but won't see any results until 2 weeks.