The Website: ******symptoms.net (what? you think I’m going to tell you a prime keyword? ; – ) I will tell you how I took it there though.
This website wasn’t even in the rankings when I came on the scene. Well wait, if you consider page 70 on Google to be in the rankings, then ok. At least it was indexed.
The domain name was brand new and keyword rich. The prime keyword receives over 3,000 searches per day and the competition is close to 2 million.
Some on-page SEO had to be done at first. Namely, tweaking the title tag, H1 tag, as well as getting that keyword placed more on the main page. I typically run the keyword frequency at around 3 to 4% which seems to work well. It’s basic SEO writing.
Since this was a domain name under 1 year old the backlinking plan had to go slow. If you link too fast and get any links over PR5, then there is a chance you can get sandboxed. (believe me when I tell you, if you get a PR6 backlink on a site less than one year old, you will disappear for a while!) The sandbox is basically a penalty by Google because they don’t expect new websites to get loads of backlinks or high PR backlinks. They will consider you a spam site until that trust can be built back up.
There are also some out there that say, who cares! They’ll dump as many links as they can on a site, put it through the sandbox, then hope it comes out in a higher position. When you’re dealing with clients though, it’s not such a great idea.
What was done here is a strategy that works very well. I limited the links to right around 1,100 per month and within 4 months this new domain name went from nowhere to number 2 in a competitive market that sees 3,000 searches per day. Have a look at the chart below.
The Plan That Works (this is per month)
LOTS of private article directory submissions.
One link wheel per month.
A number of Web 2.0 properties.
Copious social bookmarking.
High quality blog posts, on high quality do-follow websites in the specific niche.
The little jump to number 2 right there at the end was as simple as getting a couple of do-follow PR4 backlinks.
Most of all, keep this consistent.
This website went from 0 traffic to at least 1,500 unique visitors per day. That’s per day. Pretty nice, huh?