Linkrain Articles

In the most recent article I wrote about search engine optimization i described the techniques I’m using to rank high in search engines for certain keyword,s and stated that I was going to target a very difficult one: “Web Directory“. After only three weeks I was able to get on the second of Google’s search result pages at position 17. This week I was able to achieve position 12 (!!) for a couple of days but than I was kicked back to position 17. Ranking on the second page for a certain keyword is not bad, and here is the proof:

In the image above you can see the keywords that drive most traffic to Linkrain (if you are wondering why there are so many “kellemarie” related keywords, you should read this article and also this one). After getting on page 2 for the keyword “Web Directory”, my search engine traffic increased, and this keyword became the most important one for my website within a month. If I succeed in getting listed on the first page, I think that more than 10% of my whole search engine traffic will come thanks to “Web Directory” searches.

Targeting some easy keywords which don’t give many results in Google when you search for them, is surely easier than targeting one that has an output of hundreds of millions of pages, but it won’t bring you as much traffic.

Linkrain is a Web Directory and a SEO Blog ( another keyword which I’m targeting and I already made it to position 10! Actually I’m ranking on the first page of Google SERPS along with Aaron Wall and Matt Cutts ).

Both these terms are quite difficult to rank for, (”Web Directory” gives 769.000.000 results while “SEO blog” gives “only” 64.000.000 results) and at the same time they are not very popular.

With “not popular” I mean that not many people are going to search for this keywords. After taking a free trial at Wordtracker I was able to get some useful information about the keyword “Web Directory”. Based on their statistics, there are only 378 search queries a day, for “Web Directory”. A keyword like “Paris Hilton” which gets probably hundreds of thousands of search queries each day, seems to be easier to target than “Web Directory”.

Now you will surely ask yourself why I’m targeting a really difficult keyword that gets only 378 search queries a day. The answer is pretty simple: if someone is going to make a search for “Web Directory”, he is probably searching for a quality directory to submit his own website to.

Linkrain is a premium paid directory. This means that I’m working on it every day, but I’m not doing this for free. To ensure it’s quality, keep it search engine friendly, spam free, family friendly and so on, I need to spend a lot of time into promotion. For this service I’m taking a small fee which is actually set to permanent (for a one time payment you get a lifetime link).

This means that each of those 378 people that search for ”Web Directory” each day, is a potential customer! By getting on page one, I could double my actual revenue easily because people tend to choose one of the first 10 pages that get listed for a search querie. This is the reason why I suggest to target one difficult keyword related to your website niche, instead of targeting  100 easy ones ( or at least this is what I would suggest if you run a Web Directory or another website offering a paid service ).

If you own a website that does not offer any paid service but is serving only advertisements, it would be probably better to target some easy and high traffic keyword phrases (which you can easily discover by using a service like Wordtracker, that I mentioned above) instead of targeting THE keyword for your niche.