Want to work your way up in SERPs? Get and share ideas on link building, on/off page optimizing, social SEO and more.

Advice on these keywords, please.
liveinasiablog
Posts: 112
Joined: 06 Dec 10
Trust:
02 Mar 11 6:37 am

Advice on these keywords, please.

Hi all,
I am building a site, http://liveinasiablog.com. that is going to sell Chinese language learning software.

I am building a free Chinese language course....with the intent of "upgrading" the visitors to a paid software program.

I've researched hundreds of keywords and here is what I have found....

1. Average Page Rank of the sites in the top 10 is about 5 for most keyword phrases(very high). I have never seen a site below PR 3.
2. Most pages have thousands of backlinks. Many are well established domains, like the BBC.
3. Most of the pages, because they are education related, have lots of links from .edu and .gov sites (some are .edu and .gov sites themselves).

Sounds terrible, right? But here is the thing....

....there is almost zero on-page SEO being done. Even short keyword phrases, like "learning chinese," with thousands of "phrase" searches per month aren't being put in page titles, domain names, or H1 tags.

The reason is, I think, pretty simple. The people putting these sites up are not "Internet Marketers" selling e-books. They education people who have put up education sites. They, for the most part, know nothing about on-page SEO.

So, here is my question. I am going to have a brand new site that has no page ranking. With good on-page SEO and a good backlinking campaign, how difficult do you think it will be to rank among these established sites with high PRs?

Have any of you tried going up against sites like this--sites with high PR and many backlinks but poor on-page SEO?

All thoughts and opinions will be appreciated!

Thanks,

Ryan
  • 0
Site Admin
michellerana
Posts: 1874
Joined: 05 May 09
Trust:
02 Mar 11 10:11 pm

 I think what you should do is go to forums that are related to your niche and find good keywords. Choose those that would target your market and address problems. If the sites are not optimized on the keywords that you are using, then you could rank well.
  • 0
Michelle
Customer Support
=========================

Limited time special - Pathway to Passive for $37: http://www.affilorama.com/pathwaytopassive
 
joshuas
Posts: 107
Joined: 08 Jul 10
Trust:
02 Mar 11 10:56 pm

 Hi Ryan,

Is that your personal blog? I've taken a brief look at it and while I haven't read the articles yet it looks like a great site with really good information. Rather than rely on SEO primarily to get visitors, have you thought of finding some blogs related to your niche? Guest blogging is an extremely powerful way to build relationship and trust with new readers and if you have an authority in the niche 'endorsing' you as it were, you could grow your customer base MUCH faster than simply using SEO.

That coupled with using forums as Michelle suggested should help a lot in getting new visitors and people onto your list. The other way is to approach some of these authority sites and see if they would review your course and see if it is something they would promote. Usually this works even better after you've done a guest post though and especially if your posts received a favorable response.

I know my answer didn't really touch on SEO, but I thought I'd just mention some alternatives as well since I think in your situation that might actually be the better way to go.

Hope that helps.
Joshua
  • 0
liveinasiablog
Posts: 112
Joined: 06 Dec 10
Trust:
03 Mar 11 2:05 am

 Thanks Michellerana.....I'll do that as soon as I post this reply. ....sometimes it's easy to get caught up with Google tools/Traffic Travis/ SEO Power suite, etc. and forget to go back to the basics! ...like going where the customers are and seeing what they are asking for!!

Hey Joshua,
I set that blog up as a business from the beginning, but it is kind of a personal blog too, since it is so closely related to my life. ...I'm an American who has been living and traveling in Asia since 2002. Plus, I am a language textbook writer. The blog is a mixture of everything that I enjoy and that I know professionally!

As for your advice, it's great....thanks! I've taken note of your suggestions, and I will use them when the time is right. Right now I am still in the website building stage. I just have 6 of the 20 lessons I am going to put online. Once all lessons are up and polished, I'll do some guest blogging, ask for reviews, etc.

...no you didn't answer my question directly, but you did remind me that I don't have to focus on seo quite so much. I have spent the last two days researching keywords when I probably should have been building more web pages!

I'm still curious if anyone has gone after keyword phrases like I described above, so if you have.....please let us know how it went!

Cheers,

Ryan
  • 0
mack45
Posts: 236
Joined: 29 Nov 09
Trust:
05 Mar 11 1:28 am

 Hi one thing to take into account with seo is the sites ranking so high do they have the exact phrase in the url because google could be putting them together because there is not much else to do.The other problem you will run into is some sites are getting a lot of edu back links if they are education sites and that lets google rank them high. If you can get a few links from people in universities it could really help. But the quality of content is still the gold you have and it is an educational site if you are promoting courses If I had the talent to teach this is the angle I would try and promote.
  • 0
Pro at basic WP and keyword research willing to [email protected]
 

This topic was started on Mar 02, 2011 and has been closed due to inactivity. If you want to discuss this topic further, please create a new forum topic.

Topic locked