by: John Gergye
Okay I admit it. I was kidding. I can’t guarantee top 10 search engine rankings any more than the next guy.
But hold on. Before you click away in disgust I believe I’ve got the next best thing. That all but guarantees you'll get top 10 rankings. Lots of them. For next to nothing. So you might want to stick around and find out what this is all about.
You see to hear some tell it a top 10 ranking is a shoo in. A gimme. A piece of cake.
Must be since Google Adwords are crammed with all sorts of beckoning, come hither ads that suggest as much.
Now admittedly in any food chain even the bottom feeders play a role in the big scheme of things. But I don’t know. Such pitches may be hard for the typical traffic starved newbie to resist. I mean these ads suggest for a mere $49, $69 or $99 you’ll be rolling in top 10 rankings in no time.
The sad truth is you may indeed land some top 10 rankings. But they won’t be for keywords that produce much if any traffic. And if you don’t get any traffic what good are the top 10 rankings?
Still, let’s not be so hasty. While I’m not advocating anyone plunk down hard earned cash in the hopes of landing high search engine rankings for competitive keywords, hidden in the hype is a low cost strategy. In other words there’s a way to make this work. If you know how. And you will in about 60 seconds.
Here’s all you do.
Simply fire up Wordtracker. (A subscription is about $8 for a day.) Start looking for related keywords by doing a search for a broad, general, generic keyword in your niche. Then drill down and dig up all the related "exact" keyword phrases that have 9 or fewer competing pages. All that’s left is to optimize a page on your site for each one and presto chango! A top 10 ranking!
See? A surefire formula for guaranteed top 10 rankings. Brain dead simple too.
Now I call such search terms “orphan keywords”. Orphans because the search volume is so low they are all but ignored by the fat cats intent on landing the big fish a.k.a. high rankings for terms that get hundreds of searches a day.
That fact makes these orphans super simple to rank in the top 10 for. Especially since many of the competing pages aren't even optimized the least little bit.
But hold on. Let’s not high five all around just yet. There’s a tradeoff. As I suggested lack of competition is a sure sign such terms aren’t searched for often. Maybe no more than a mere handful of times each day in Google.
Okay so how do we make lemonade out of those lemons?
The best way to make this tactic work is to find a ton of these terms. And don’t worry. Most niches are loaded with orphan keywords.
Then here’s your next step. Simply create content pages that each focus on two, or at most three, of these small fry.
Put up 100 such pages and you’ve probably got 250 of these 9 or fewer competing pages phrases covered.
To get to 100 pages all you do is create four pages a day - five days a week. If you miss a day make it up over the weekend. But by the end of five weeks you’ll have 100 pages hard at work for you. Now that’s not so hard now is it?
Even better these orphans come with a collective traffic jolt you wouldn’t expect.
I’m looking at one list of orphan keywords that shows 309 daily searches in Google. Another came in around 513. While the orphans for a third niche had over 1876 Google searches each day according to Wordtracker!
Given all that I casually suggested this micro traffic idea to a friend with an already successful web site. In other words he wasn’t hurting for traffic. Which made this a no lose proposition for him to test.
About four weeks later he excitedly reported his traffic had doubled! That’s right doubled. That got my attention. Should get yours too. Because this orphan keyword strategy is a surefire way to get top 10 rankings for a whole host of lesser keyword phrases. Giving you near exclusive access to the traffic that comes with them. While leaving the bruising battles for the hyper competitive terms to someone else.
Pretty clever, huh? Absolutely.
Copyright 2005 John Gergye