Technique description: Single Keyword Sniping means creating an entire website with the purpose of ranking number one in Google for only one particular keyword.
The aim of the technique is to create small websites that bring you a completely whitehat autopilot income from advertising without having to create new content for the websites or promote them in any way. These are simply set-and-forget income streams.
Estimated average income: 100-500$ per month per website. You should start with a minimum batch of 10 websites which will lead you to an estimative income of 1000-5000$ per month. Actual figures depend on the type of keywords you decide to pursue, I have had a single keyword sniping website earning me well over 1000$ per month, but I do not bother creating websites that earn me less than 100$ per month.
Estimative time frame: You will achieve success somewhere between 2 weeks and several months, depending on the keyword you chose, sandbox issues, use of aged or new domains, your potential for building links, etc… This is a long-term whitehat income method.
Starting costs involved:
- Poor man version: No starting costs required, you will build your sites on free blogger platform(blogspot.com, blogs, etc.) and you will build all your links by hand.
- Struggling entrepreneur version: 10$ for a domain (per year, or even less if you go for an info domain) and 5$ per month for a small plan hosting. You will build your websites on general sub-domains site1.mydomain.com, site2.mydomain.com, site3.mydomain.com, site4.mydomain.com etc…
- Normal entrepreneur version: 100$ for ten domains and a 10$ per month hosting should be enough.
- Smart entrepreneur version: 100$ for ten domains, a 10$ per month hosting, and a couple hundreds of $ for outsourcing work and buying links.
The method consist of 3 steps:
1. Keyword research – choosing your keyword
2. Website creation (including on page seo and monetization)
3. Link building
1. Keyword research
The advantage of single keyword sniping over traditional long tail keyword theory is that while your competitors usually optimize one page for a certain long tail keyword, you optimize your entire website, therefore having a huge advantage in terms of links, trust rank and authority. It is much easier to rank an entire website for a particular long tail keyword than to rank a page.
That being said, the keyword you choose to optimize for should have 3 important characteristics:
a)-a nice amount of searches per month
b)-low competition
c)-potential for monetization
a) A nice amount of searches per month
In my opinion, the best tool that estimates the monthly number of searches for a given keyword is this one (it’s free):
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
When analyzing your results, under the “match type” field you need to choose the “exact match” option. For keyword sniping, this reflects the best the amount of visitors you should expect (for an explanation of the meaning of the match type, please see this link https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6324&ctx=tltp)
In addition to the number of searches provided by the keyword tool, you should expect 30% more visitors, based on my statistics. These will come from various long tails, misspells, keyword tool inaccuracy, etc…
A decent volume of monthly traffic is anything between 2000 and 20 000 searches per month for a keyword sniping website.
b) Low competition
I would love to tell you that in order to asses your competition all you have to do is search your keyword in Google in commas, find the number of competing pages, and draw conclusion from there, but, unfortunately, this is a flawed concept. It does not matter whether there are 100 000 pages or 1 million competing for a particular keyword, it matters the quality of these competitors. When assessing your competition, you should look only at the top 3 results. Since your purpose is getting the number one position, all you need to do is to create a better site that the one found at the top for that particular keyword, and you will bypass all the other millions of competing pages found behind.
This is the raw click distribution in serps:
Number 1 – 58.36%
Number 2 – 13.45%
Number 3 – 9.82%
Number 4 – 4.00%
Number 5 – 4.73%
Number 6 – 3.27%
Number 7 – 0.36%
Number 8 – 2.91%
Number 9 – 1.45%
Number 10 – 2.55%
As you can see, if you can not achieve tops position, you should not even bother creating the website. Actually I would say that if you can’t achieve the number one position, due to the fact that is occupied by an authority website in that niche, you should not start building a website around that particular keyword. The keyword sniping philosophy is created around gaining the number one position and benefiting from the flow of traffic.
There are advanced seo tools that can analyze your competition backlinks- like seo elite- but there are also free firefox plugins that can do the job for free. Two of such plugin are “seo for firefox” and “seo quake”. You can download them for free here:
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
http://ff.seoquake.com/
These plugins will instantly show the number of pages, links, page rank, age of the domain, etc… of your competitors in search with a simple click.
As a rule of thumb, you should avoid competing against websites that have a pr bigger than 4, and do not even think to compete against sites that have site links under them in serps. This means in most of the cases that they are already established in that niche and it will take a while before you can overcome them. The roi might not compensate for the effort.
c) Potential for monetization
Most of the keyword sniping philosophy is based on gaining quality traffic from search engines and monetizing it with adsense or other affiliates products. When you choose your keyword, you should ideally aim for a high paying adsense niche, or a niche that has plenty of other streams of monetization – cpa offers, affiliate products, etc… It is not worth the effort to go for the classic 1 cent adsense clicks niches with this strategy – like celebrities, music, movies, etc…
You should also avoid tech savvy niches and go for non tech savvy niches. Savvy users do not click ads- usually the ctr in adsense in under 2-3%, while with non savvy users you can get ctr as high as 10-20% regularly. Do not think line an entrepreneur, think like a normal Joe when brainstorming your niches.
You can see approximately the value of your clicks in adsense by using the above mentioned Google keyword tool and selecting the “show average cpc” option. You will get somewhere between 20%-40% of the value mentioned there.
Once you have decided upon a keyword, and you have analyzed the traffic and your competition, it is time to create your website and start optimize it. If you are new, and never done any kind of seo before, i think you should start with some easy keywords, nothing that have much competition. This will allow you to conquer these positions easily, and you will gain confidence for more competitive keywords later on. Keyword sniping is an excellent way to learn the ropes of keyword, research, content creation, and link building, even if you are a total newbie.
It is also highly recommended that you start to build around 5-10 websites at once. Building a website, then waiting for several weeks or months to gain results, and then starting to build the second one is not an efficient way of doing things. You ll probably waste a year before having 10 websites in serps already bringing you cash using the one-after-the-other option, when you can have them in less than 2 months if you choose the bulk strategy.
Also, having a larger number of websites is also a way to protect you in case one of your keyword sniping websites do not perform as expected, gets sandboxed, or your competitions proves to be more competitive than you expected. By having 5-10 such websites, you diversify your income streams, and even if one of your website does not perform well at a certain moment, you can rely on the income coming from your other websites.
2) Building your website
- Domain name selection
If you do not have money to invest in buying domains and a hosting, then you could use the free blogger alternative. Blogger is a service offered by Google that allows you to create unlimited blogs, free of charge, and – unlike other similar alternatives- you can monetize the blogs and keep all 100% of the revenue produced. Your subdomain will look something like: chosenname.blogspot.com.
If you chose to opt for a domain, keep in mind that serps are not influenced by the top level domain you choose, and there is no difference between a subdomain and a domain.
The advantage of having your own domain is – among others- that you can sell it later down the road, for a nice chunk of money, especially if your keyword sniping website is bringing you a nice recurring income.
Your domain or subdomain should contain the keyword you try to optimize for, this is a must. The presence of the keywords in the domain name is a crucial factor in getting good positions, especially for long tail keywords.
You should also pay attention at keyword density in title. Something like keyword.com is more valuable than keywordblablabla.com.
-Website creation
The easiest way of creating your keyword sniping websites is using the wordpress platform.
Ideally, your website should consist of 5-10 articles, 600 words long, and having a keyword density of 2-3%. All the content on your blog should be original, so no scraped or auto generated content. This will help you with avoiding sandbox, getting ranked, and establishing a whitehat income- no fear of getting banned from adsense or search engines.
Every one of your articles should link back to your main page using the keyword you target as an anchor text. This link back should preferably be found in the introductory paragraph – whenever someone scrapes your content – or the rss feed – automatically it will create a backlink to you.
Other than that, the blog should have a basic on site seo optimization – se friendly permalinks, avoiding duplicate content, etc…
(If you have never done basic seo on a wordpress blog, check this article for a general idea, or ask for help in the forum http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/)
Getting double listings in Google:
A double listing appears in most of the cases when two pages of the same website rank on the first page of Google for a given particular keyword.
Google serps therefore merge those two pages, upping the lower page at the level of your upper page, and offering you more exposure with a double listing.
Double listing allows you to fill 2 positions with your website for a particular keyword, and obviously, is a huge advantage in terms of getting traffic.
In order to benefit from this, you should also create an article on your website that has the title exactly the keyword your optimizing from. If your domain is keyword.com, you should obtain the second listing with the article keyword.com/keyword.html Make sure to interlink those two pages, keyword.com linking back to keyword.com/keyword.html with the anchor text required and vice versa. Once you will send some backlinks to these pages, you will get a double listing.
3) Getting backlinks
This is the most important part that can influence your success. Whoever gets the most quality targeted links, conquer the serps, there is no doubt about that.
But first, several aspect regarding the quality and type of backlinks you need.
-You aim for backlinks that have your targeted keyword as the anchor text. However, variations of the anchor text is an important issue, getting plenty of links with the same anchor text is called Google bombing and can result in your website being sandboxed or penalized.
If your targeted keyword consists of 3 words, “word1 word2 word3″ your anchor text variations should look like “word 1 word 2″, then “word 2 word 3″ and then ” word 1 word 3″, and most of the links, obviously “word 1 word 2 word 3″.
If your targeted keyword consists of only 2 words, then you need to vary your anchor text by adding other related words, like “word 1 word 2 blablabla” or “blablabla word 1 word 2″.
- An influx of low quality backlinks over a short period of time – several hundred links in a matter of days is detrimental to your optimization, and usually leads to a penalty if you are using them on a new domain. Make sure to build links at a steady pace, and in the beginning try to throw in several authority links to avoid getting sandboxed.
- Between site wide and single page links, try to opt for single page links, they are more valuable.
- A backlink coming from a niche related website is far more valuable than a backlink coming from an unrelated website, even if it has a pr of 0.
- You should focus also on building deeplinks, not only home page links. A good percent is 80% home page links, 20% deeplinks.
Building links:
Specific details for link building are to be discussed in the forums, i will just list some general guidelines. I usually classify links according to their quality in two main category:
Level 0 Backlinks: pr 0 links, usually placed on newly created pages, not much of link juice. You should get hundred of such links to make a difference, but they do have their role. Example of sources for level 0 backlinks:
- Social bookmarking. You can automate building these kinds of links with the following websites – for free.
http://www.onlywire.com
http://www.socialposter.com
- Forum posting links – please check the forum for the invisible backlinks trick and for do follow forums
- Blog commenting on do follow blogs
- Directory submission – become obsolete later, but if you do not have any other source of links, you could give it a try. Here is a good list of directories sorted according to their page rank: addurl.nu
- Article Marketing : can be done manually or automated. More tips about this will be posted in the forum.
- Blog farming and parasite hosting links
Level 1 Backlinks: These are usually high quality links, high page rank links, that have a nice pr juice and can influence your serps significantly.
- Link exchange. When done properly, they could be a gold mine, since you can decide on what anchor text you want, and you will have your backlink placed wherever you want, usually on a related page. Exchanging links with a related website can be done two ways. Exchanging links with a non related website should be done three ways or more, in order to avoid detection.
- Buying links. Try to avoid classic networks such as text links ads or tnx.net as Google seems to detect and penalize them. Use direct links brokers, found in webmasters forums.
- Miscellaneous Links. Other innovative way of getting high pr links, such as the fake identity exploit posted in the blog previously
