Keyword Ranking – What Doesn’t Work, What Does, and How To Do It

For as long as Google has been around, marketers and webmasters have been trying to rank for specific keywords. Before Google, most search engines mixed ‘real’ (organic) and ‘sponsored’ (paid) results, and it was easier to rank by simply buying a position. Regardless, the available traffic – the number of searches and amount of commerce – was still relatively low.

Once we reached the point where significant sums could be made by targeting individual keywords & phrases, the ‘game’ was on. In the “early days”, when the sophistication of search was considerably lower, it was possible to gain top rankings through simple tactics such as keyword stuffing. As search evolved, the effort required evolved with it.

Since the value of a top listing can be huge, and grows along with the general growth of internet usage, a whole cottage industry of keyword ranking has grown up in the internet marketing industry. Along with various keyword and website tools, products such as George Brown’s “Google Sniper” and “Google Sniper 2″, and John James Robinson’s (‘xfactor’) “Micro Niche Adsense Course” exploited these opportunities with courses in how to build and rank these ‘single-keyword-focused’ sites “quickly & easily”.

The main strategy revolved around researching long-tail ‘buying’ keywords (or alternately ‘product name’ of ‘product model #’ keywords), building a small site around the product and the specific keyword phrase, and – in theory, anyway – getting it ranked on Page 1 . More specifically, there were a slew of keyword research methods and programs designed to find those terms and phrases with sufficient search volume and “commercial intent”. This gave an approximate sense of their ‘value’, whether it was the CPC (“Cost per Click”) for Adsense, or the value and likelihood of a sale (as in “Nikon D7000″). From there, these methods generally translated as using the chosen term in the page title (title tag), article title (H1 tag), and throughout the body. Finally, build enough exact-match anchor-text backlinks, and you had yourself a Page 1 – maybe even #1 listing.

Even beyond the internet marketing cash-grab products, the more “traditional” SEO methods varied little: optimize for specifically-chosen keywords using page, title, and H1 tags, and generate anchor-text backlinks.

Since Google unleashed “Panda” however, this is no longer a viable strategy. In fact, ranking for individual keywords by itself is a failed strategy; this new, emerging “2.0″ environment requires an entirely different strategic focus. Of course you can still rank for individual keywords, but that’s now a function of a broader set of circumstances, and if you don’t understand them, you’ll have a difficult time of it. Worse, you might find yourself getting penalized.

It isn’t terribly hard to discern “keyword-ranking optimization” efforts. Most of us could look at a page and determine if, and for what keywords, the page is optimized to rank for. So how hard would it be for Google to do the same thing, even algorithmically? Don’t let occasional appearances or hearsay fool you: Google is a VERY smart animal. And with Panda, Google has begun addressing many of these, and other ‘obvious offenses’.

So What’s A Marketer To Do?

The answer, in a word, is “Content Marketing”.

We begin with some new suppositions: first, single-keyword-focused sites ala “Google Sniper” and “X-factor” micro-niche sites don’t work. Does this mean small, ‘micro-niche’ sites should be avoided or don’t work? Certainly not; our own “Adsense $100k Blueprint” course teaches how to do ‘micro-niche’ sites properly (it’s worth noting, the course is over a year old, and some of the sites used to develop it predate the course by two years, yet none have been “Pandalized”. In fact, with the exception of those sites that we’ve completely neglected, all have maintained their rankings and revenues).

The key here is “micro-niche”, or more precisely “niche”, rather than “single-keyword-focused”. The sites we build and teach, and most others that have maintained their rankings, are true “niche” sites, meaning they focus on a narrow topical interest; the content, layout, and ranking focus is a broader niche-relevant “keyword phrase group” rather than a single keyword.

Which brings us to the next supposition: theme relevance. By this I don’t mean a WordPress ‘theme’, I mean ‘theme’ as in ‘niche’ or ‘topic’. Successfully ranking keywords requires that the effort be a broader ‘thematic’ focus. Beyond the single-keyword-focused sites, a good red flag indicator of ‘keyword ranking manipulation’ for Google is the “variations” keyword group. We’ve all seen these, sites like “www.bright-green-widgets.com” with a page each devoted to “bright green widgets”, “widgets that are bright green”, “green widgets that are very bright”, etc.

A ‘legitimate’ topical niche site doesn’t look like this. Instead, it might have pages such as “bright green widgets”, “history of widget-making”, “choosing a widget color”, and “bright versus plain widgets”. In our courses, we teach looking for niche opportunities rather than keyword opportunities. The research to find and assess these niches eventually leads to a “seed” keyword, what we refer to as an “umbrella term”. It’s the main or primary keyword phrase that essentially describes what the site will be about, and ‘under’ which all the other keywords come.

By way of example, an early site we developed was CNA Training Class.

I had been researching the ‘Vocational Training & Careers’ niche, looking for what I term “secondary” niches and “secondary” keywords. I use that term to imply the less-than-obvious high-competition niches that are often chosen, looking instead for opportunities ‘under’ or ‘below’ the obvious big ones.

In this case, while poking around various career training and certification programs, I came across a keyword phrase “CNA training” that eventually led to that ‘Grand Slam’ site – sold for $32,500 100 days after registering the domain, reaching over $300/day by 9 months. It fit the bill as a ‘secondary’ phrase & niche: it wasn’t a ‘mainstream’ target, but there are a lot of people interested in the area – meaning good search volume, and good “commercial intent”.

With the chosen niche of “certified nursing assistant” and the keyword “CNA training” as my ‘umbrella phrase’, I began developing a ‘keyword phrase group’ – keywords that fit under the main term. Phrases such as “CNA skills test”, “Red Cross CNA training”, and “certified nursing assistance degree” became my ‘keyword ranking targets’. As a result, I ended up with a thematically tight, relevant niche site, with each post & article supporting the others (the appropriate keyword phrases fit naturally in the content throughout).

My backlinking efforts for the most part remained relevant – articles, social bookmarking, Web 2.0 sites, etc. Building backlinks became innately relevant because I used relevant content and went after backlink opportunities that I had some control over i.e. Web 2.0 sites that I would build, making sure to populate them with content that was either in the vocational training & career niches, or the medical & healthcare niches. Articles followed the same topics, meaning my ‘in-content’ links were automatically relevant.

And as a result of that, I was able to get top rankings for my chosen keywords.

Going forward, with the additional ‘burden’ of Panda, we have to be even more careful in our keyword ranking efforts. Those days of succeeding by using software automation to generate hundreds or thousands of low-value blog comments, for instance, or paid packages of thousands of ‘profile links’, are gone. Worse, doing so can definitely hurt us.

On-page, we still want to include the target phrase in the title, page, and H1 tags, but no longer want them all to be “exact match”. Using “dog training collars” as an example, the page title might be “dog training collars”, while the article or post title and/or H1 tag might be “The best dog training collars”, or “Collars used for dog training”. Also, having more than a few instances of the exact phrase is no longer necessary, and again might hurt us.

Guest blogging, private article & blog networks, on-topic Web 2.0 sites, forums, and blogs – these are the areas to stick to for backlinks.

As for the keywords themselves, keep them thematically related (but not those obvious ranking-target variations). A great resource is your Google Webmaster Tools account. It will tell you what keywords your site is already being shown for. Look for the ones that have high volume that you aren’t directly targeting, and use the lower-volume ones within the body of new site content, which in most cases will get you improved rankings just like that.