The Tree vs leaves scenario-Calling forth all SEO experts for Brainstorming!

Let me Try to explain my situation clear....

After months of my niche finding exploration for my next project i finally found GOLD.I not only found one keyword but a group of keywords which are interrelated but unexplored...Well except for this guy who has built a empire around these keywords.

Let's say the keyword i found is 'Tree' my competitor has built individual websites for each of the keywords like 'Tree.com' and 'branches.com' and 'fruits.com' and you know what he is ranking in Top 5 for all these Keywords....

i am planning to have a main wordpress website "TREE.COM" with pages or categories for 'branches' ,'leaves' and 'fruits' ,maybe even following SILO.My plan is i can steal most of his traffic by doing some decent seo .

My Question is......Who do you think is positioned better?
Is it my approach or my competetor's approach?

Oops....I guess nobody is as excited as i am....

Thought i can find a few SEO experts here to pitch in and throw their 2cents...

I think i haven't explained my question properly.I will Try sleeping Now...

If I followed your description accurately - your method is better - unless your comp has domain names with his branches and fruit keywords.

The reason we build tree, branches and leaves on one domain is to give the site authority for the theme. A one page or two page site doesn't have theme authority and the only reason it ranks well is because of off page factors like no comp, ton of backlinks and or both. An authority site will trump a thin site (or group of them) every time once it's properly indexed.

jodys said:

If I followed your description accurately - your method is better - unless your comp has domain names with his branches and fruit keywords.

The reason we build tree, branches and leaves on one domain is to give the site authority for the theme. A one page or two page site doesn't have theme authority and the only reason it ranks well is because of off page factors like no comp, ton of backlinks and or both. An authority site will trump a thin site (or group of them) every time once it's properly indexed.

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Badass. I've been curious to hear someone address this for awhile. I see the same thing in my market. My most powerful competitor has built satellite sites for various keywords instead of making them part of his site... always boggled me.

Cheers

I agree with every word of you...

But...Yes,my competitor has domain names with his branches and fruit keywords. (but he has only 200 to 300 backlinks)

Is that going to be a big factor?

My Idea was that i will build my main site with categories for each of his leaves.com and fruits.com etc...I can snipe and rank for all his keywords.....

My biggest advantage is...He has little defence....He has to defend and do SEO for his 24 sites ...while i have to Care to do SEO for only one main site.

Am i Right?Or am i missing something here and living in Dream?

jodys said:

If I followed your description accurately - your method is better - unless your comp has domain names with his branches and fruit keywords.

The reason we build tree, branches and leaves on one domain is to give the site authority for the theme. A one page or two page site doesn't have theme authority and the only reason it ranks well is because of off page factors like no comp, ton of backlinks and or both. An authority site will trump a thin site (or group of them) every time once it's properly indexed.

Click to expand...

You are right and make damn sure you set your category permalinks with your keywords. Don't use unfiltered urls with ? and set the slug for your exact kw phrase so the link has it. In case you didn't follow it's like this:

kw phrase = ipad cheats

Comp's thin site domainname

ipadcheats.info

Your domain with branch link

ipadsource.info/ipad-cheats

Build your backlinks to each branch for those keywords. Basically you have to do about as much work has he has but with all your leaves and branches related to the trunk you now have an authority site which dominates thin sites or mfas with other factors being equal. Google's reasoning is simple, your site will have more to offer an ipad user with just one click. An optimized thin site doesn't have to explain what each page is about but it can only appear for a very limited set of kw phrases. An authority site will appear over and over for a wide variety of kw phrases.

Another advantage is you won't worry about Google labeling your site a mfa and suspending your account if you have an authority site. Thin sites are risky with Google Adsense.

thesmashge said:

Oops....I guess nobody is as excited as i am....

Thought i can find a few SEO experts here to pitch in and throw their 2cents...

I think i haven't explained my question properly.I will Try sleeping Now...

Click to expand...

I'm pretty excited...cause I do it. Silo, definitely. Each of the sites share traffic and you can keep making money off of the same peeps.... works well. My sites are fairly "thin" and they do well. They're usually about 7-14 pages each.

Thanks Jodys for discussing seo.I feel more clear now....

Domain keywords amount to squat... make sure you use keywords in the slugs and document filenames.

PR is making a comeback in the SERPs right now. Its a real good time to drive 1000-6000 links to your site splash page...

A week's worth of effort and you should be able to crush him unless he has beaten you to employing basic SEO. Then you have to beat his investment in SEO and out-tune him with your content. Drive up relevancy by tuning every page for a singe search term. Make the keyword density 5-15% no higher... 5% is pretty extreme as is... just be higher than his pages.

One secret trick... link DO FOLLOW to non-competing relevant pages about the keywords you are tuning for... Make sure the keyword density on those pages is note worthy... (Super SEO Secret few people know.... those relevant pages can even be ON YOUR SITE! How sweet is that!)

Don't use H1! H5 is much better CSS style it to look however you like.

Here is todays list of tag weight from google:

1 title
2 samp
3 acronym
4 index
5 h5
6 cite
7 p
8 pre
9 textarea
10 kbd
11 caption
12 small
13 code
14 bdo
15 strong
16 sub
17 abbr
18 u
19 ul > li
20 strike
21 sup
22 body
23 tt
24 td
25 dl > dt
26 em
27 i
28 s
29 caption
30 del
31 ins
32 dfn
33 h1
34 h3
35 a
36 img.alt
37 select > option
38 (input-input).value
39 a.href
40 (meta-value).value
41 (meta-description).value
42 (meta-author).value
43 document
44 b
45 html comment

Make sure you use favicon, apple-touch-icon, robots.txt, proper doctype tag

Don't use keywords more than 4 times in a title. Once is plenty and does just as well as 4 , but 5 gets you a one-way ticket out of the SERPs...

Only use 1 meta keyword... any more than 3 and they get ignored completely. Consider it like each word gets an equal share of the relevance... 10 words means each word has 10% the influence it could have had. Meta Keywords have actually always worked with Google... most people just use them incorrectly. Matt Cutts claims of they don't matter is just him blowing smoke.

ipopbb said:

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I've decided that you may never leave these forum and must continue to post information of this caliber on a daily basis.

It's crazy that h5 is #5 on that list... it makes sense though... EVERY bit of SEO info out there tells people to use the h1 tag, so naturally google will see how spammed that tag is, and make it less relevant. But i wonder, why the h5 tag? Has h2-h4 been spammed a lot too?

As these things are always changing so h4 could be the new h5 in a month's time... Are you constantly tuning your sites' code to coincide with your relevancy research?

Another question for you, about the dofo.llow link to a non-competing relevant page. I remember hearing something like this before. The person said that linking to the wikipedia page about your subject from your home page will result in a nice bump. Is this the kinda thing you're referring to?

Your idea is much better than his and I know that because I have a 45 page site and a 68 page site that kick ass in the same manner. The other thing is that once you get them rolling, you can do nothing and still make money if you have monetized them properly.

45 page site, low paying but pretty competitive niche, built in Jan of last year, bunch of articles, forum links, directory submissions, etc makes me 80.00 a day and I have done nothing to it/for it since September of last year.

Remember 80% of SEO is off site, and I would use the Google Wonder Wheel to find related keywords to build your silo structure.

@ipopbb i wonder regarding that h5 declaration. is that *really* better than h1 / h2?

BTW,
@thesmashge
the info you provide us - is only on page, content. what about your comps off page? how many links? what type of links? how old are his domains?

I'd also build a master site with pages focusing on the longer tails kw. but in your case, it seems like focusing on micro niches is better.
i'd build severl microniches + 1 main hub site. link every microniche from the hub sites page dealing with the microniche.

but again, its hard to plan ahead without knowing exactly the structure of your kws, and their topic.
I'd focus on off page anyway.

Wow...this thread is now more valuable(to me) than those $997 products.

Hardhat...my competetor has around 200-300 links for each of his sites...he has also formed a chain with his own 24 sites.

But i guess i could overthrow him with more backlinks.I will snipe his keywords one by one...he has 24 sites to defend and atleast i will capture few of those keywords in google.Wel...that's my plan basically....