S.E.O

The Overlooked SEO Technique

Comments (0) 04.12.2007. 10:31

A guy I happened to know by the name of “Nextwish” started a very successful blog titled Wave of Destruction, a blog filled with photos, videos and current events from the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

This blog was getting some serious traffic and as I sat back and watched Nextwish rake in his Google Adsense earnings (put aside the ethical considerations)… jealousy kicked in. My mind went into overdrive, searching for an idea to launch myself into the “blogging world” and earn myself a piece of the Google adsense pie!

I had run many websites before, mostly gaming related as that’s where my passion lies, but I remember thinking I had to find a good source for my blog, something that provided me with endless content on a regular basis!

Then it clicked.

At my work we just so happen to have an exchange public folder titled “jokes” that is solely used for the purpose of archiving funny pictures, jokes and videos. This folder gets at least 2 to 3 funny video’s posted to it on a daily basis. You know those emails that office folk receive and forward on to all their friends in another office, who forward on to friends in another office – providing entertainment for those boring lunch breaks! (Or important meetings!)

I had found my source. Funny video’s coming straight to my email and more importantly, ON A DAILY BASIS!

I quickly whipped up a website, registered a domain and unleashed my site onto the World Wide Web. Back then I had little knowledge of driving traffic to websites and absolutely NO expertise in search engine optimization. Days, weeks and months went by with my website statistics not showing any promise. I was about to give up when I came across Entrepreneurs-journey which contains a few guides about Search Engine Optimisation. This eventually led me onto Problogger, SEOchat and other SEO related sites, filled with useful information!

Most of the SEO guides talked about Keywords, something I had NOT taken into consideration. I started researching keywords that I wanted to target by using the Overture keyword tool which allows anyone to see how many times a keyword has been used in a search engine.

I noticed that the keyword “Funny vids” (which I had used) was very popular, however I entered the keyword “funnyvids” and saw that it was being searched for A LOT LESS than “Funny vids” BUT still enough traffic to pursue.

I decided to start easy and aim for a top 3 spot using the keyword “Funnyvids” .. and it worked. On the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) I achieved a rank in the top 3. My website statistics quadripled and whilst nothing to rave about, I was relatively pleased. 90% of my traffic was now coming from search engines. (1.2% from the US Military. Should I be worried?!?)

The keyword “Funny vids” was being targeted by many big name websites and thus the competition was harder to crack. By choosing the keyword “Funnyvids” I was able to attract this untapped traffic by those who used this keyword as a search term.

So you see, by using the Overture selector tool you can find potential untapped traffic that major websites may have overlooked. Give it a go and see how it works for you!