This month I have been concentrating on building a couple of authority sites. These sites are in popular niches and I am targeting some really competitive keywords, the sort of keywords I would have avoided in the past when I was developing the sort thin / micro niche sites that go after the keywords that have very low search volumes.

The change of approach comes about due to what I am learning from Brain Johnson’s ’300 IM’ course. The theory is that google loves good content, and that if you spend some time creating a site full of unique content then you will have the SEO clout to rank well for some really competitive keywords, and hence bring in a flood of traffic. Obviously this all needs to be set up in the right way (SEO wise), but the single most important factor if you want good search engine rankings is a ton of quality unique content on your site.

Brian’s teachings on this are very timely. Just think about Google’s recent ‘farmer’ and ‘panda’ reviews and what were they all about. Well Google was trying to get rid of all the spammy sites with limited content and loads of adsense, and all the auto blogs full of duplicate content. This was google sending a clear message about what it wanted to see, namely orginal quality content…and lots of it.

If you want to achieve good search engine rankings, then the best advice is to give Google what it wants. Don’t waste your money on the latest bit of spamming software that claims to have found the google loophole. At best this might work for a short while until google spots the problem and plugs it (slapping all your sites for good measure at the same time). At worst (and more likely) it just palin won’t work.

To my way of thinking it is much better to spend your time building up knowledge in an established profitable niche and start to build a long term website assest based full of great content about that niche. It’s more rewarding, its more effective and I believe it is going to be much more profitable in time.

 

As I am writing this in mid may 2011, I have yet to un-block my sites to allow search engine access. May is all about building content on the sites. Later in the month when I have enough initial content prepared, I will unblock my site. The target will be that I start to rank for some of the easier keywords (but still competitive) later in the summer, and that I crack the really big keywords before christmas.

 

Wish me luck, I will let you know how I get on.

Filed under: SEO best practice

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