Why Most Sites Never Make Much Money in SEO

Rahuldev09 said:

buy it, best way but must be carefull.

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RealDaddy said:

@splishsplash what are your thoughts on KGR keywords?
I actually know many people with successful KGR based affiliate sites, making money with zero to very little links.
They make around $1k - $2k per month.
It's not in the range you typically play in, but still it's money

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Also, I didn't mention, but external links are important. No one uses them. Always add at least 3-4 external links to every page. MINIMUM of 2 for short articles. If you want to add 20, add 20. They don't hurt you. I did an experiment a couple of years ago on an article ranking in position 17 or 18. It was about 7000 words. It was very big. I added about 30-40 external links to it. Relevant, to topics surrounding the main article. Within about 1-2 weeks it rose to about 12-13.

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splishsplash said:

Also another key thing to remember is you don't want or need to be backlinking every article.

There's actually not THAT much of a correlation between links to a page and rank.

If you look at this en-mass you will THINK there is, but, this is more what happens :-

1) A page moves up the rankings and gets top 5
2) Over time, that page will then attract links, because people writing content will google stuff, and link to generally sites in the top 5. If a page has no ranks, no one finds it to link to it.

So because of that, you'll see some big pages with a LOT of links, but those links actually came after the ranking, and you can usually spot that by looking at the timeline of links and the timeline of rankings.

I also think it's easy to trigger algorithmic issues by hitting a page too hard, or doing weird things like backlinking every page with 2-3 backlinks.


When your internal linking is setup properly juice is going to flow around your site nicely.

The best way to link is just sporadically and trying to keep it as "natural" looking as possible.

That could be 2-3 links to some informational article, 1 to a money page, 2 to another money page, 2-3 to the homepage.

However, try to make sure that pages with more incoming backlinks are internally linking to your important pages using target anchors.

It's especially effective to backlink support/info pages. It's far more natural for your info/guide page with zero affiliate links to get 7-8 backlinks than your "best toaster" page.

Judge it by the page. If it's a mega guide, blast it a bit more and go for 5-8 backlinks to the page, then internally link to both other support pages, and 1-2 money pages.

For internal links I do 1-2 as standard per page, but for bigger articles I'll do 3-4.

Also, I didn't mention, but external links are important. No one uses them. Always add at least 3-4 external links to every page. MINIMUM of 2 for short articles. If you want to add 20, add 20. They don't hurt you. I did an experiment a couple of years ago on an article ranking in position 17 or 18. It was about 7000 words. It was very big. I added about 30-40 external links to it. Relevant, to topics surrounding the main article. Within about 1-2 weeks it rose to about 12-13.

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splishsplash said:

You create internal links when you create the article. There's no reason not to. By the time your article is indexed, google has already crawled it, so it wouldn't make much sense to add them in later.

You can certainly go back and add in internal links at any time, it doesn't hurt to do that.




I'm glad you loved my content, but did you actually read it? Here's a snippet from what I said.



I went on to say that high quality content is BETTER because you'll have a more sustainable website and you'll get better engagement signals when you're on page 1. But high quality content by its self will NOT rank you.




Good domains cost $200-$1000 at auction. Design is about $50. Good initial content $20 to $100. Hosting is on average about $5/mo. So do the math on a $30 link.

Build your own pbn.



This is where the confusion lies.

Google is absolutely not looking for some sweet spot percentage which varies depending on content length. That's not a good way to analyse content.

The only time you pay attention to kw density is to make sure you haven't gone really high, but it does not play any role in ranking.


There's no difference in the way you will rank a 2000 word article compared with a 4000 word article.

The 4000 shouldn't have double the keywords of the 2000.

They both need a certain amount of exposure to the main keyword group otherwise google will just not consider it relevant. People who are ranking with just the main title in the keyword and think that's all you need are not understanding the algorithm. If all you needed was the keyword in the title and high quality content, then on-page seo wouldn't even exist. Google would essentially be a near human level AI that could look at a title and say "Ok, this is about X", then read the article and conclude "This is a high quality article about X, with good information." It cannot do this.

So how does it rank pages?

Is it so simple that all it does is look for the keyword in the title? The notion of that is ridiculous. If so, then what's next? To rank based on what has better backlinks?

Or does it just look for a keyword density for 1 keyword? That also is incredibly simplistic.

The first thing you need to understand is google does not rank keyword. It ranks pages.

It's not looking at your page and considering for keyword X, and then doing a kw density check.

It's looking at your page, and it's building a sort of graph data structure of that page, with weighting values for different keywords.

It then knows, from the rank graph, how those keywords relate, because they themselves have weights of relevancy towards each other, so it understands "topics". This is what hummingbird was. That's when we had the shift of ranking for keywords, to ranking for topics. In the past "best toasters", would be considered different from "toaster reviews".

So once it's built that data structure of your page, it then has an understanding of where your page fits and what it should rank for.

After that, they then look at other pages on your site and they will create another sort of graph data structure with weighting values for different topics. This is why it's hard to rank a site if you create a whole load of unrelated content. They are more likely to rank your "how to walk your dog" article, if you have other pages that have topical relevancy related to dogs, dog training, dog walking, dog behavior and so on.

As part of this, they are also looking at your internal anchor text. It's a very easy way to help understand what a page is about. They used to do this with external anchor text, but it was too easy to manipulate, so penguin came into play. External anchors still help, but if you trigger an unnatural link building(via penguin) filter then they will(and this is from patents) reduce the effect of certain links, because they consider those links to be unnatural. They are constantly looking at your links and trying to determine "is this natural". If the answer is "yes", then you get juice, if it's "no", then they reduce the juice passed.

So in summary, to optimize pages, it's not about the actual density, it's about how often you are using the keywords, where you're using them AND the topics on the page.

Let me give you an example of how you would correctly optimize a page.

Let's go for a keyword to start "laptops for nursing students"

In fact. I'm going to write this in a separate article, because it's going to get lost here.

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splishsplash said:

Yeah, it won't matter that they're low obl, moderated and do follow.

Certainly better than nofollow spam garbage, and you will get a little benefit, as you do get benefit from user-built links, but the benefit is limited.

The difference between a good contextual link and others is very high. 1 good contextual link can cause you to go from number 80 to number 15, or 19 to 14, or 9 to 8 etc. You would *never* get that from any sort of comment link. You might see number 80 to number 68 with a link like that.

It's worth doing a few like that just to add more links to your profile however. Profile, directories, a few manual comments etc are all useful to pad out your profile and google expects to see them for a natural site. A webmaster is expected to be doing a little promotion, a press release, adding to some niche directories, creating business profiles, adding some social media profiles etc.




Always manual. No plugin is going to be able to do this. It's pretty advanced stuff. It would need something with AI to do properly. It's actually something I have in the pipeline to create some SaaS for internal links.

For now just keep a spreadsheet. Or even better, use airtable.com. With airtable you can filter/sort in different ways. You could group by anchor, group by linking page, group by page being linked to etc so you can see everything clearly. airtable is amazing.




Google doesn't rank based on keyword density. I doubt they ever did.

The only time you want to bother with kw density is to make sure it's not too high, but for an article over 2000 words it's very hard to have a high kw density unless an idiot has written your article and just keeps repeating the keyword over and over and over.

In saying that, make sure trips are < 1% and pairs < 2%.

What IS important is keyword usage. You want to be mentioning "best toaster" a good few times. title/header, first paragraph, once or twice more in the body, and once in an h2/h3. 3-7 times per article whether it's 1500 words or 4k words, but for 1500 words more like 3-4 times max. You don't get any benefit using it too much, but if google is only seeing "best toaster" in the h1/title and then once in the body, it is probably not going to think your article is very relevant for best toasters.

But on top of that you want to make sure you use variations on it that you as a human know are connected. "top 10 toasters", "the top toasters", "toaster reviews", "these great toasters", "the very best toaster", "this toaster is the top choice". It all counts. As I said above, it's more of an art than a science.

When I'm optimizing I look at who ranks on page 1. I remove any outliers, which are strong sites, and pages different than mine. That means if I'm ecommerce, I only compare with ecommerce, if I'm review, I compare with reviews and so on. I usually leave myself with 2-4 sites to compare to and I look at their keyword usages, the topics they're using and how many words they've got, and I structure my content accordingly.




Interesting question.

SEO is a slow game. Everyone wants the quick buck. Even in advertising people try to profit straight away instead of calculating their 6 month LTV and aiming to profit on the backend.

With SEO you want to be thinking in terms of a 2-3 year plan.

There are different approaches depending on your tolerance for risk and experience.

You might invest high and aim to profit only on a sale after 18 months. Ie, invest $50k, get a site up to $5k-10k/mo within 18 months then sell for $200k-$500k.

If you're just building up to grow then you're looking more at breaking even after 18 months to 2 years, then going into profit. SEO is pretty damn long term. I don't know many people who can have a site profitable within 6 months or less other than very low-end sites making a few hundred $ a month.

It comes down to this. The longer you're willing to wait to breakeven, the more you'll make. If you invest with the goal of breaking even after 18 months, then you're going to build something pretty impressive in the $10k/mo+ region. Ie, if you invest $15k in the first 3 months, then $1k/mo for another 12 months, you're going to be hitting $10k/mo after 12-18 months.

So, the way you approach it is to have a set budget for your project. Set aside an initial amount $x, and a monthly amount $y. Your initial amount is your content and initial base link building(not expensive, just a press release, social, some niche directories potentially and high quality profile listings). Your monthly $y is split between your link building and on-going content. 50/50 for the first 6 months is good, then 70/30 in favor of link building for the next 6 months, then 50/50 again from 12 months onwards.

And you just keep a spreadsheet with all your costs to date and earnings. A tab for each month with each expense and the income for that month, and 1 tab with a summary of total income, total expense per month.

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