The Ultimate Guide To Ranking A Website Without Building Backlinks

yes indeed a nice post.
i too does not waste my time in making my hands dirty in link building but this is really awesome. you have good knowledge. but i have a question.
Can i rank on the first page with these ways?

Well written, concise, and a great help for a newcomer such as myself! I was digging for more information on ranking without necessarily using comment blasts etc. especially for regular clients. You have my thanks, good sir!

feelfreeto said:

The question about "competition" in G Keyword Planner: does it actually reflect the ranking competition?
As long as I am aware it represents the competition among AdSense advertisers.

To be fair, I've met both explanations on the internet. I understand that intuitively people tend to go for the lowest competition regardless of the context, but in this case it might be so that we are interested in highest competition - the higher competition among adsense advertisers, the higher demand for the product.

Quote from KW Planner regarding competition: "How to use it: See how competitive ad placement is for a keyword. " It doesn't reflect how competitive KW is to rank, does it?

P.S. I don't have clear understanding. I wrote all that to initiate a discussion to clarify it to myself and to others.

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feelfreeto said:

Why does the guide says to go for "low competition" then?
Are there any advantages ranking wise (if we are not talking about adsense)?
Or we can easily neglect it?

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Hello, feelfreeto!

To answer your question, "low competition" in this guide means low competition in the Search engine results pages (SERPs), not in Adwords or Adsense.

The keyword competition in the Google Keyword Planner (which is for PPC advertisers on Adwords and publishers on Adsense) is not the same as the keyword competition in the SERPs (this is SEO competition or "ranking competition"). Here is Google's explanation of what the competition level in the Keyword Planner means:

Competition: The number of advertisers that showed on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. Note that this data is specific to the location and Search Network targeting that you've selected. In the "Competition" column, you can see whether the competition for a keyword is low, medium, or high.

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So it's just the number of advertisers who are targeting that keyword in their ads.

As far as if there is any correlation between PPC competition level and SEO competition level, I honestly do not pay attention to the PPC competition level when I'm selecting the keyword as the factors mentioned in part 2 of the guide are what's important (something I omitted from the guide was checking the backlink profile of the sites in the SERPs, although I only do this if glancing over the keyword is not enough), although the keywords I look for tend to be more obscure (under 1,500 searches/month), so most of them have a low Adwords competition level.

With that said, I've seen many keywords with a low Adwords competition levels that are difficult to rank in the SERPs.

patrickthomas said:

yes indeed a nice post.
i too does not waste my time in making my hands dirty in link building but this is really awesome. you have good knowledge. but i have a question.
Can i rank on the first page with these ways?

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Hey there!

I cannot guarantee 1st page rankings with this guide as there are too many other factors (your site's authority, your SEO skills, etcetera) that could cause you to rank lower in the SERPs, although when I pick the right low competition keyword, I do not have an issue ranking on the first page (as I mentioned in the post below).

Zwielicht said:

You're welcome, but while backlinks are very important, they're still only 1 factor in Google's algorithm.

For example, here's a screenshot of the SERPs for a search query that contains the exact keyword that one of my sites "Sy" is ranking for (sorry about all the censoring, I just had to do it).

The article that's ranking for that low competition keyword (it receives a modest amount of searches per month) was recently posted using the tactics I described above with no backlinks built to it (the few it has are from people naturally linking to the article, but the article was in the same position as it currently is before those backlinks), yet it has managed to rank in the 3rd position below Imgur itself.

I've been using this method for quite sometime now on both my websites and my clients' website. Assuming I choose the right low competition keywords the first time, I usually have no trouble ranking on the first page without backlinks. Once people start reading my articles, they naturally create backlinks to them and my article's position in the SERPs usually receives a nice boost as a result.

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to Zwielicht:

I totally misunderstood you.
I've read twice that paragraph of your guide about competition and together with the screenshot where you chose the KW with adsense competition "low", I thought that you were saying that the adsense competition in KW Planner reflects ranking competition.

I've just reread once more and now I see that you never said that

feelfreeto said:

to Zwielicht:

I totally misunderstood you.
I've read twice that paragraph of your guide about competition and together with the screenshot where you chose the KW with adsense competition "low", I thought that you were saying that the adsense competition in KW Planner reflects ranking competition.

I've just reread once more and now I see that you never said that

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It's fine, I had no issue explaining it in further detail to help you out.

Nice read. Learned Keyword Cloaking. Thanks man.

Zwielicht said:

Hey there!

I cannot guarantee 1st page rankings with this guide as there are too many other factors (your site's authority, your SEO skills, etcetera) that could cause you to rank lower in the SERPs, although when I pick the right low competition keyword, I do not have an issue ranking on the first page (as I mentioned in the post below).

Click to expand...

Thanks Mate.
Now i understand what you mean.
What if i purchase a expired domain with some authority and page rank and write posts as according to your guide?
i think they can rank on the first page.

Zwielicht said:

Part 2: Choosing A Keyword Using The Google Keyword Planner

The first step to choosing a keyword is to open the Google Keyword Planner and enter any keyword related to your article (or any keyword you think would be a good match based on what your competitors are using). We're going to be looking for low competition keywords that receive a decent number of searches per month for their competition level. To help you understand this, I'm going to be using a fictitious puppy training website that needs new keywords. Now, what I prefer to do to find low competition keywords by sorting the results by "average monthly searches" and then go through the pages until I find the keywords that receive under 1,000 searches per month.

For the sake of this post, I'm going to select a variation of the keyword "crate training a dog" in the image below called "how to crate train a puppy fast".

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This is a great explanation that I need. Thanks before to you, provide us the solid rock tutorial for SEO without backlink.

I have question to you, look at the bold and orange text, quote from your article.

Are you choosing the keyword "crate training a dog" as your focus keyword, in the post which the title is "how to crate train a puppy fast?" I am sorry for this newbie question because english is not my mother tongue

Anyway, thanks again!

masarmy said:

This is a great explanation that I need. Thanks before to you, provide us the solid rock tutorial for SEO without backlink.

I have question to you, look at the bold and orange text, quote from your article.

Are you choosing the keyword "crate training a dog" as your focus keyword, in the post which the title is "how to crate train a puppy fast?" I am sorry for this newbie question because english is not my mother tongue

Anyway, thanks again!

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Hello, masarmy!

It's fine, I think I understood what you were saying.

Anyway, the focus (primary) keyword in that example is "how to crate train a puppy fast". While the Google Keyword Planner information is not shown in the first image for this keyword (I didn't want to have to go back and make another image, that's why I didn't change the keyword), the image below that one in Part 2 are the results for "how to crate train a puppy fast". This keyword is merely a variation (LSI keyword) of the "crate training a dog" keyword, although just ignore the keyword "crate training a dog" in Part 2. The original guide I wrote had a section on finding LSI keywords, but after I lost the original guide, I accidentally omitted that section.

Hello bro,

Hm.. I got it now. Big thanks bro. I am using your guidance now for building my website. Fyi, I have a friend here that have simple online shop, using wordpress. He said to me that he never using backlinks, nor AGC, but he have traffic about 1,000-1,500 uv per day. Just optimizing WP with plugin and theme, also using the good VPS in Digital Ocean.

He have 100+ website that generates money, so now he become million dollar man!

I wonder, how can he have websites like that.. Or maybe he use the similar technique like you? He tells to me, all of his website is "set & forget".. haha.. What do you think?

Excellent thread, OP! Congrats for the writeup and thanks for sharing!

Bookmarked. This looks interesting

Hello everyone!

Something I'm seeing a lot of confusion about is how this method can even work without you building backlinks. A few people (definitely not most of you) are coming here after reading Tommy's "Stop Believing These 10 SEO Lies Right Now! The Truth Will Set You Free..." thread believing that the purpose of this guide (ranking without building backlinks yourself) contradicts Tommy's thread, but I'm here to tell you that it doesn't contradict his thread and that there is always more than one way to reach the goal.

You see, the way this method works is simple: you create your content, do on-page optimisation using low competition (often also low-search) keywords, and wait for your page to receive its initial rank (notice how I said "initial". I'll get to that in a moment). But one thing I didn't mention in the original post is the other purpose of this guide, which is something I vaguely mentioned in another post I created on this thread.

Zwielicht said:

...The article that's ranking for that low competition keyword (it receives a modest amount of searches per month) was recently posted using the tactics I described above with no backlinks built to it (the few it has are from people naturally linking to the article, but the article was in the same position as it currently is before those backlinks), yet it has managed to rank in the 3rd position below Imgur itself.

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You guessed it, the other purpose of this guide is to get backlinks without building them yourself, or as Tommy mentions in his thread, "content is a means to get links". This method relies on finding low-competition, low-search (under 1,000/month) keywords at the start to get a decent initial ranking, and then waiting for people who like the content to link back to it ("natural backlinks"), that way you can rank even higher for your primary keyword and for the variations (LSI keywords) of that keyword. This way, you aren't actually building the backlinks yourself and you can focus more on putting out high quality content (which is why this guide is great for someone who doesn't like actively building backlinks).

With everything considered, if you haven't tried ranking using this method or you couldn't figure out what I explained above about how you could procure backlinks with it, then I don't want to hear you criticise this method by saying "you can't rank without building backlinks"; to each his own.

I hope this cleared up any confusion that any of you may have had about this thread.

This has to be one of the most on point articles i've read on this forum. While this tactic works for low competition keywords, it SHOULD also be used as your primary guide for building any website. This is the strongest foundation you can build and adding backlinks to your website will indeed make it more authoritative! Therefore, you'll be building a killer website anyway.
I really hope more people read this and stop falling for the seo packages that are being sold here. You're always better off building a high quality website and paying for high quality links.

Excellent thread. Lot's of great stuff here. Thanks Zwielicht!

Nice thread man. I never tried ranking a site without backlinks, but I do determine how good my content if it starts to rank on it's own after a few days that I wrote it. Good stuff, thanks for sharing.

Great read. Good guide for people just new to SEO. Learned a lot from it.

Thanks a lot for this awesome article, i will use it definitely

A good read. How do you use tag pages, should they be indexed? Won't they cause duplicate content?