I’ve been meaning to post some info on keyword sniping for some time so my apologies for taking a while to do this.
There are a lot of things you need to know about other aspects of internet marketing in addition to the keyword sniping (KS) technique and I can’t address everything in one post so I’ll concentrate on the techniques I use and skip over some of the other stuff.
Choose Your Niche
Choose your niche - this is vital to the success of KS. Then choose at least 2 good keywords. For keyword research I use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you intend to make money from Google Adsense then click on the show/hide columns and choose Show Estimated Avg. CPC You will need to pick keywords with a reasonable high CPC. If you are new to IM choose keywords that have more than 5,000 searches a month and less than 30,000 competing sites.
Set Up Your Site
The whole point of keyword sniping is that your whole site is optimised for 1 or 2 keywords. The keywords should to be in the domain name, and must be in the title, the description and in the content on the home page. You will need to add at least 10 pages of good content to the site all about your keywords. If you’re using WordPress you can remove the dates from the posts to make them all look like pages rather than posts. On each of the pages make a link with your keyword as the anchor back to the homepage. Pages should be at least 300 words long.
Some Points about the Site Structure
- You need the title tag on every page. If you are using WordPress you can use the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin it do this.
- A link in the footer to point to your homepage using the keywords as anchor text.
- On the home page keywords should be included about seven times. This will be okay if you have a least 1000 words of text so you could set your home page to have four posts appearing all with your keywords in them.
Back Links to Your Site
Most importantly you need to get links to your site using your keywords. Vary the anchor text, don’t have all of the anchor text exactly the same. Use your keywords that mix them up a bit with different words.
You need to get links that are on relevant pages. The best way to do this is to submit articles you have written yourself. I’ve been using Article Marketer to submit articles recently. Although it is a paid service I’m finding that it is much faster than ISnare which I was using and they also look at your article and check that they are formatted correctly for the article directories. Most articles have been approved and submitted within 1 working day. ISnare lately has been taking more than 2 weeks. For some of the sites I have made I only needed 2 articles distributed to a range of article directories to rank high in SERPS. Of course it depends on the competition so you will need to add more if you don’t get the ranking.
How Long Does it Take?
It won’t hapopen overnight so don’t despair! It took a minimum of two months to begin to rank well and some sites took much longer. Submit another article if you don’t see results within about 2 months.
Before I give you the results of my keyword experiment so far I want to talk about Court’s latest post - As it turns out content is king
Court has removed all his keyword sniping post and shut down his new keyword sniping site and his paid keyword sniping course. This very drastic measure is a result of his site being dropped from no 1 in SERPS to page 7. He has said that people have mistaken his keyword sniping posts to mean that content doesn’t matter and that he is misleading people with the posts. That people who are reading his posts then making thin sites will be penalised by Google. I, and I am sure many other people, have not interpreted it this way. In fact after reading the posts I realised that i wasn’t putting enough content on my sites and began to add more. So for me the posts had the opposite effect. I fully intend to continue using the keyword sniping technique.
So what are my results so far?
I began the experiment in the beginning of July and after 1 week my results were as follows
Keyword A
- Position after 2 days 219
- Position after 1 week 125
Keyword B
- Position after 2 days 112
- Position after 1 week 106
Here are my SERPS today (Sep 12th)
Keyword A
- Position after 2 months 34
Keyword B
- Position after 2 months 51
Unique visitors to date 1,356
So keyword A has gone from position 219 to 34 and keyword B from 112 to 51. I haven’t published any more articles than the original 2 that I submitted to Ezine Articles and then to iSnare and Free Article Submission Service. I have added 3 of my original articles to Qassia for the backlinks. I really need to write some more articles for distribution!
I can access my websites on Blue Host (at last!) No idea what the problem was but, as I said earlier, it seems to have been a server somewhere between me and the hosting server.
Here’s a list of the plugins I’ve found most useful on my keyword sniping sites. Hope you find it useful!
All in one SEO Pack Always essential for any WordPress site of course!
Category Posts Widget Put your posts in different categories then display by category in the sidebar
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Easy to use sitemap generator
Google Sitemaps Always need a Google sitemap!
WordBay Only needed if you’re displaying eBay auctions
WordPress Related Posts Helps SEO by internally linking your posts
WP-DBManager Excellent, easy to use, database backup manager. Automatically finds your database (and the absolute path to it). Can be set to email you the database at regular intervals.
WP tags to Technorati Changes your tags to Technorati tags then displays them after posts (or anywhere else you want)
That’s all the plugins I’m using. One of the reasons I love WordPress is that, whatever I’ve wanted to do I’ve found a plugin to do it! Anyone have suggestions for other useful plugins?
It’s a month since I set up my keyword sniping experiment so here’s a report on the progress so far.
Total visitors 659
Google 347 MSN 96 Live 33 Referring sites 122 Direct Traffic 27
Keyword A position in Google After 1 week 125 After 1 month 97
Keyword B position in Google After 1 week 106 After 1 month 68
keyword B is a seasonally affected keyword that has few visitors in the summer. The trend starts to increase in August so I expect that to have an influence on the no of visitors. Probably not the best keyword to use for my experiment!
So my number of visitors is a little disappointing but probably expected as I am not optimising for long-tailed keywords with few visitors but trying to eventually get more visitors by targeting harder keywords. My positions are coming down and I still have directories and article sites yet to approve my submissions. I’ll leave it for a while then try to submit some more articles.
Keyword sniping is a phrase coined by Courtney Tuttle to target keywords by making the whole site optimised for 1 or 2 keywords. If you haven’t seen Court’s post on this head over to Introduction to Keyword Sniping. Most sites will optimise a page for a keyword, by optimising the whole site you can, in theory rank well for much more competitive keywords. I was very impressed with this method which is very clearly explained by Court so I’ve set up a couple of sites to see how it goes. I’ve also tried to keep the cost down as much as possible by using free software (WordPress and WordBay) and submission services when possible.
I won’t explain the whole method here, Court does a very good job of that, instead I’ll document what I have done to test this method and report on my results. Continue reading ‘Experiment in Keyword Sniping’
Table of contents for Keyword Sniping Experiment
- Experiment in Keyword Sniping
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