Gr1Innovations

Teaching you how to make money online since 1999

Keyword Pyramid

If you’ve gotten yourself here somehow looking for skin lotion I suggest clicking here and checking out Amazon.

But if you are actually in the right place…

One of the most important things you can do for a site is build links for keywords related to or that contain your main keyword. Generally speaking the longer the keyword is the easier it is to rank for, so while you’re seeking that coveted #1 position for your keyword why don’t you try to get some of its cousins’ rankings up there as well? Let me explain what I like to do.

First, I start with my site’s main keyword. Of course, I put some effort into tracking a good one down, because nothing sucks like building a site and pushing it to number 1 only to find out that it gets no traffic. Or working for 12 months and realizing that you’re never going to rank for the same term as something with a movie by the same name. Let’s say for the purposes of this article my word is going to be “skin cream”.

Secondly, I like to find 3 or 4 related keywords that are essentially the same thing as my main keyword; basically in any given sentence they could replace the actual keyword. These should be words you really could build an entire site around if you wanted to. For this example let’s say “facial cream”, “body lotion”, and “hand cream”.

Third I think of some qualifier words that I could easily stack on the front of my keyword to make it a long tail keyword. Find words that are somewhat related to the industry your site is about… again for this site I’m going to use “anti-aging”, “moisturizing” and “natural”. Now I’ll work my way down and make all the combos of my stacker words combined with my keyword and its cousins:

 

– skin cream

– anti-aging skin cream

– moisturizing skin cream

– natural skin cream

– natural anti-aging skin cream

– natural moisturizing skin cream

– moisturizing anti-aging skin cream

– natural moisturizing anti-aging skin cream

 

– facial cream

– anti-aging facial cream

– moisturizing facial cream

– natural facial cream

– natural anti-aging facial cream

– natural moisturizing facial cream

– moisturizing anti-aging facial cream

– natural moisturizing anti-aging facial cream

 

– body lotion

– anti-aging body lotion

– moisturizing body lotion

– natural body lotion

– natural anti-aging body lotion

– natural moisturizing body lotion

– moisturizing anti-aging body lotion

– natural moisturizing anti-aging body lotion

 

– hand cream

– anti-aging hand cream

– moisturizing hand cream

– natural hand cream

– natural anti-aging hand cream

– natural moisturizing hand cream

– moisturizing anti-aging hand cream

– natural moisturizing anti-aging hand cream

 

For my main keyword and all its major cousins I will write a LONG post (like 2000 words) and give each of them their own “page”. The main keyword I stick on my main page permanently. Try to write naturally, and try to use the longer versions of your keyword more than the shorter version. I name the post pages the longest word we came up with.

Now comes the link building. When I build links to sites like this I generally build somewhat evenly for all my keywords to start out. Get the site to rank at least in the top 5 pages for all its words and then start worrying about particulars. Once all your words are findable, I start working from the bottom up (ie. start at the longest version of each keyword). I’ll still link with all the different anchors, but until I break into at least the top 5 spots on page one my focus will be on the longest word. This will give you some confidence and hopefully a little trickle traffic.

Once I’m ranking well for “natural moisturizing anti-aging skin cream” as an example I go up and start hammering the site for my next level of keywords (all three of the ones with 4 words). Again I try to get them into the top 5 or so, and I bet you’ll see your 5 word keyword move up a little as well. And just keep working up the list, now focus on your 3 word keywords, and when they are doing well it’s time for the big guns, our two word keywords (which by this time should be ranking pretty well on their own).

Hopefully you’ve worked all your keywords into the top 3 at this point and now is where you need to take a look at your stats. What keywords are driving the most traffic? Are you in position 1 for those words? If not start working on those ones until you are. It won’t take long and you’ll have your niche (and a lot of keywords) completely taken over. And hey, if you ever manage to get into position 1 for all your keywords find another couple of cousins of your main keyword and start at the beginning. With the authority your site will have earned to this point I bet it is even easier than before to dominate another word and grow your site another 20%.

Best of luck!

Best Link Building Practices

Ok so to continue my trend of writing about debates I have with people on the Keyword Academy forums I thought today I would write about best link building practices. There are important things to keep in mind while building links, but like most aspects of MMO ‘winning’ it is accomplished 99% through doing and 1% through thinking. So as my first point the most important thing about link building is just go out and do it instead of worrying about how to do it. A “no follow” link is better than no link at all. A link that is anchored with “click here” is worth more than no link at all. Are they the best, no, but they aren’t completely worthless either.

Ok so the ultimate thing we want to do is to try as best we can to make our links look natural to Google. That is essentially the goal of everything we do when building links. So the real question is what can I do to make my links look natural?

  • Vary your anchor text – Natural links occur and get anchored in a ton of different ways. Don’t just anchor your one target keyword for every link you get, anchor things that are close to it, misspellings, your URL, your site name, and even the odd “click here”
  • Deep linking – People who get natural links don’t just get links to their homepage, in fact a lot of the time people send their friends links to interesting articles or write about cool things they see on a site. Deep linking to your individual pages is important and a lot of the time is can be profitable too because you can use your deep pages to target more keywords.
  • Quality vs. Quantity – What’s the answer to this old question? Well the answer is both. If all you get are crappy links well then your site is going to take forever to rank, but you don’t need to worry about getting every link from a PR9 site. A link from a forum isn’t going to give you as much value as a link from the NY times, but 1000 might and might be easier to get.
  • Blogroll vs. In Content – There is always a lot of debate around blogroll and how valuable they are. A lot of people (some of whom make a lot more money than I do) say in content links are the only way to go, but I can tell you I’ve had more than my fair share of luck with blogrolls. Mix it up and get both.
  • Speed – When you start a new site you don’t want to blast the links out too fast. Instead start out slowly and build up momentum like an avalanche . Eventually you’ll be able to send your site as many links as you want, but the growth needs be be slow and natural.
  • Related Niche – Sites from a related niche are better than links from an unrelated site. Google looks not only what links are pointing to your site, but what links (internal and external) are pointing to your links.
  • Links from the Same Site – The more sites you build links from the better. Don’t think that two links from the same site isn’t providing you any value, but two links from two different sites are better than two links from the same site. This is not only good for authority, but it’s diversity. If one of those sites go away at least you still have one link when you could potentially not have any links left.

Anyway that’s just a basic overview of the best linking practices. I’m sure we could think up experiment after experiment to test out each best practice, but hey, it’s not worth the time when you could be spending it just building links. Now stop reading and go get yourself some links.

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Gr1innovations.com launched way back in 1999 and was one of the first sites of its kind. Then, when the internet really became mainstream a few years later, it gained fame as the #1 ranked make money online blog in the world.