Keywords, Ranking, & Search Engine Optimization Fun

I am a Search Engine Optimization newbie. I have read a little on various forums, browsed a few articles, and read through The Affiliate Masters Course (Ken Evoy) a couple of times.

Eleven days ago I invested a little of my affiliate earnings in a new product that was being launched.

The Dowser Professional is a keyword research tool on steroids, and has allowed me to improve the returns from the few existing niche websites I already have, and find a number of new niches very quickly.

I was so impressed with The Dowser Professional that I decided it was a key product I wanted to promote as an affiliate, even to the extent of developing a product specific niche website.

I am very much a believer in Ken Evoy's technique of "pre-selling". If you provide a customer with proof that a product works, and what they could do with the product, you can maximise your sales potential.

So I set out to prove that The Dowser Professional was an insanely powerful tool, and that anyone could easily use it to improve their website(s) and find rich new niches.

I set myself what I believe is the ultimate challenge, to target SEO experts on their own turf.

I picked an initial keyword to research, "keyword".

Within a few minutes I had a good list of related keywords, and within 20 minutes had completed my keyword research. Yes the whole process was that fast.

I then setup a Blogger.com blog based around the keywords I selected.

http://keyword-report.blogspot.com

The primary keywords for the site are "keyword position report" (KEI approx 6K) and "keyword ranking report" (KEI approx 3K). It is amazing that such large holes can be found in a very competitive niche with only a few minutes work, but that is the power of The Dowser.

I set myself a very strict rule. No seeking links until the site was indexed and had achieved ranking based purely on keywords.

Today (July 28th 2005) the site was picked up by Yahoo. It ranks 1st and 5th for it's primary keywords, and has already received traffic from both Yahoo and Technorati.

The site is not yet listed in MSN and Google. I expect it to rank well on MSN and poorly on Google until it has some incoming links.

The site contains maybe 30% original content, and any articles used were carefully "wrapped" with specific keyword heavy text both before and after.

Andy Beard has worked in Sales, Marketing and Localization for the last 15 years, primarily in the computer games industry. His blog Exploring Niche Websites gives insights into creating profitable websites on the internet.

Additional related information including screenshots of example Yahoo ranking are available on his Niche Website Blog

Reporting on the success or failure of Keyword Position Report will appear in future articles.