Beating the Search Engine Part 2: this Ongoing Case Study and its Antithesis
On Documenting this Experiment
(If you haven't read the first part then go here: Beating the Search Engine Part 1)
Okay, I guess this is a good thing, what I've started. It could be some sort of ongoing and real-time case study. People from the future can study the breakthroughs of this experiment or perhaps even its mistakes or whatever.
I remember watching Zuckerberg in the movie The Social Network updating his Livejournal blog about his progress. I mean, surely it's based on real life and I am sure he did document his progress. It's nice to imagine what kind of success all this could bring to me. As if a stupid keyword like lechon could even bring me anything close to that. And so against conventional thinking, I continue my silly little quest to become the Lechon King of the internet.
So what's new? How come I'm not spending my two hours a day devoted in writing more content or backlinks for the Lechon Blog? Well, I seem to have encountered a bit of a problem. I am not really sure how serious it could be.
I've actually already discussed how Blogger sucks compared to Hubpages in my Blogger vs Hubpages article. I'm actually starting to think that I have greater chances of ranking if I continue this experiment by posting more on my chosen keywords here instead of Blogger.
What seems to be the Problem?
And so I was reading about some guy who used Blogger for a micro niche site. Obviously it was something very similar to what I am doing. The problem is, his blog and his Blogger account got pulled out because Google considered it as a spam site. This worries me because not only does it risk destroying this whole experiment, it would also risk my other blogs included in the account. Some of my blogs there are serious and less focused on SEO and more focused on quality such as:
- My Food Blog: where I write about my reflections on the joy of eating and how much I love food.
- My Advocacy Blog: where I write about the importance of liberty and the evils of big government.
When I write on those blogs I don't think about keywords or any other thing related to SEO. Instead, I really focus on sharing stories, ideas, and opinions regardless of ranking ability or revenue.
So it's either I transfer the contents of my lechon niche site or I risk getting my account deleted. So my plan is to just leave it there, create a new account, and a new blog where I can continue my lechon ranking plan (I figured generating content is very easy for me anyways).
Analyzing the Competition
Okay so as we can see, these are the search results for the keyword lechon. I guess it's always a good thing to observe and analyze the competition in order to be better than them and eventually destroy them.
The first two are, of course, from the famous WIkipedia. Although I've seen this site outranked many times, it's considered by Google as an authority site and will be very hard to beat. It's also not that easy anymore to edit its content. But one of the plans is to edit its content and add a backlink directly to my new niche site (nothing is impossible).
The photos also won't be that hard. Although as of now I don't have much of my own photos of lechon and have been stealing from the Google images search results (as you may have noticed). It's mostly all about keywords in the content and using the "alt=" html tag to add data to the image (search engines can't see or comprehend photos because only human beings can do that).
The next two are privately owned domains by the two most known lechon providers in the country: Lydia's and Mila's (not including Cebu lechon of course). This doesn't really scare me at all. Most companies still take the powers of SEO for granted and this is prevalent in their websites. As a matter of fact if you search the keywords "Shakey's Delivery" on Google, you will see that my Hubpages article is already second to the main and official website of Shakey's (although the plan is to outrank them eventually of course). What more if you add to the keywords? Perhaps the user is looking for the menu or delivery number?
The last one is obviously a Wordpress website using SEO techniques. For all I know, it just might be an SEO company with an army of bloggers and SEO specialists. And here I am, just a an individual without my own domain.
It is a long shot but I shall not give up. I will eventually be the lechon king of the internet.
Will this even be lucrative?
A few days ago I was reading about the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog and how it got half a million views in just one day but only earned like 500 dollars or so for that day. It does make sense somehow, since it took me 6 months and around 100k views just for me to reach the Google Adsense payment threshold.
It is slow and tedious. My estimate is that I will be able to reach the payment threshold monthly in 2 to 3 years (this is, of course, not taking into consideration my other epic plans and ideas).
So this silly little quest is seemingly futile, huh? Well, not really. In this whole process, I get to practice and become even more powerful, get a lot of backlinks and rankings (hopefully), and write this interesting and hopefully entertaining story about how I'm trying to beat the search engine and how I want to be the lechon king of the internet. You see, people trade because they know they'll be better off or else they wouldn't do it. The more I try to help my readers and inform them, the more views I will get.
So now I'm just focusing more on quality and sharing what I know rather than just focusing on ranking and spamming to get traffic. This is always a good thing, I guess.
Beating the Search Engine Part 3
Also I have made a new blog specifically on my ideas and thoughts about SEO here: Beating the Search Engine Blog
