How I Got Rich

My .org.uk Knocked Off Page 1 by .co.uk

My keyword domain site on a .org.uk domain had worked its way up to the top half of page one and had been there for a while.  It was getting a few hits a day and making a few sales a month.  Today I checked my stats as I do most days and noticed it was no longer on page but the .co.uk version of the domain was sitting at number two!

I’m pretty certain when I bought the domain that although the .co.uk was registered there was no site on it – otherwise I wouldn’t have tried to compete with it as its a bit cheeky to use the same domain as an existing site in a small niche.

From doing a site: in Google I can see it has about 150 pages against my 10 or so so I guess the better site has won.   For now…

To my untrained eye it does look like they are using some kind of feed to generate all the pages for the site.  This is something I would like to try myself but have no idea where to start.  Any ideas?

Google AdWords vs Google Keyword Tool part II

Just a quick update about this topic. According to AdWords, yesterday my campaign got 197 impressions. Bear in mind this wasn’t campaign wasn’t running a whole day but during that period my site got five hits.

So five as a percentage of 197 is 2.5%. Now I know my site is only at number two but that is a pretty poor showing. Needless to say no one has clicked on my ad.

I will wait and see what the stats are like for the next few days and report back.

Getting all my sites to number 1 in Google

This might sound like an obvious goal but for now I am going to focus on getting my existing sites to number one in Google.  Most of them are at number one in Google for their main keyword but not all of them.

Normally I start a new site, put up some content and wait for it to get to number one.  If after a while it is not on page one or close then I leave it and move on.  But as I have vowed to not make any new sites for a while I am thinking I might as well get the sites I have to number one so I can see if any of them will get any traffic.

I have sites for keywords that get, according to the Google keyword tool, anything from 3,000 to 50,000 exact searches a month.  As I’ve now realised the Google keyword tool is not to be believed and does not even give a rough idea of searches.  This has made me think that I might be sitting on a site that gets 100′s of 1000′s of exact searches each month and I won’t know until I get the site to number one.

So with that in mind I am going back to my older sites that don’t rank well and seeing what I can do to get them to number one.

I’ve never really done any work on back links so I might have to finally get around to giving it a serious go.  I will also be adding content which I will probably end up outsourcing as I don’t have much spare time any more.  It is quite expensive at £10 for 500 words but probably cost effective in the long run?

Anyone got any tips for getting a site to number one in Google?

Google Keyword Tool Strikes Again

Nearly all my niches look good on paper with well priced products (£20-£100) and 20,000~ exact searches a month.  However once I get the sites to number one in Google I quickly realise that either the Google Keyword Tool was misleading with its estimate for exact match searches or no one wants to click on my sites or that the click through rate for being number one in Google is less than 5%.

Take one of my earlier sites for instance.  Last month it is reported by the Google Keyword Tool to have gotten 18,100 exact match searches but during that month it only got 529 unique visitors which is less than 3%.

I know the Google Keyword Tool is not renowned for its accuracy but surely this is way too out for it to be of any use?

I have checked my other sites and nearly all of them get around 5% of the figure quoted by the GKWT making them a waste of time as the traffic is so low!

How do you check that a niche is actually searched for?

WordPress Sites Not Indexing Correctly

I’ve recently ‘launched’ a few new sites built using WordPress and none of them have fully indexed.  The home page is indexed but none of the other posts or meta data is indexed in Google.

Thanks to gary_ap on the A4U forum I have found out that there is a new setting in WordPress that by default is set to ‘I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors’ to view the site.

I have since changed this setting to ‘I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers’ and my robots.txt file has been updated and hopefully my sites will be indexed fully soon.

This setting can be found under:

• Settings
• Privacy

How Many Hits Do You Get When You’re Number 1 in Google?

I’ve had a look at a couple of my sites which are ranked number one in Google.  I wanted to find out what percentage of the total number of searches a site gets when it is number one in Google.

One of my sites that is number of a search term that got 22,200 local exact matches in May got 140 hits from Google users searching on that term in the last seven days. This works out as 3% (140 as a % of 5012 = 3% (rounded up)).

Another keyword got 5,400 exact local matches for May which is 1,219 in 7 days. This site got 56 visits from Google users searching on that keyword string which is 5% (rounded up).

Has anyone got any comparable data?

update: another one of my sites is now number two in the Google serps with no ads above the number one site.  The site is optimised for a keyword that got 14,800 local exact searches last month.  It is not a seasonal item so should be similiar this month.  In the past three days it has had an average of of 5 clicks a day from Google.  This works out to a 1% click through rate for a site in number two position.