Exhausted your link sources but still not ranked number one?

Posted by stuart as linking, link love, seo, search engine optimization

I’m doing some SEO work for a friend of mine at the moment. It’s been an ongoing thing, the site’s been optimised as best it can be for the keywords in question, I’ve exhausted my list of around 1,000 directories (yes this does work), written and submitted articles to all the worthwhile article directories (this works too), yet he’s still not ranked number one for his main keywords. First page, no doubt, but yet to grab the number one spot.

So what to do? Give up? Sit and wait?

I don’t think so.

We’re obviously on the right track, we wouldn’t be on the first page of results if we weren’t, we’d struggle to improve the on-page or on-site SEO, so it just comes down to links. There’s not a whole lot of other places for us to drop links. This is a particularly competitive industry, so none of his competitors are going to pony up a some linky goodness.

Do we just start buying links? I think not, this is no long term strategy, as we don’t want our ongoing rankings being held to ransom by some random webmaster.

There is one thing we can do though, which can help immeasurably. Whilst we may have used up pretty much all of the places we know of to drop links to this site, we can create another site and do it all over again.

“What, so you can have two sites in the top ten, but neither of them in the number one spot?” I hear you ask?

Well, you’re half right, and half wrong. I know we can move a second site into the top ten for his keywords, we’ve done it once, there’s no reason we can’t do it again. But doing it again gives us one distinct advantage.

We have an authority site to link from.

Whilst I’m a firm believer that a shitload of links is a good way to get a site ranked, there’s also a lot to be said for a single link from an authority site in the same niche. Google obviously thinks our existing site has some sort of authority, or it wouldn’t rank it in this quite competitive local niche.

So we’re off to create a second site. This is a particularly long term strategy, I wouldn’t recommend it for an affiliate or AIS site. The site we’re doing this for is a bricks and mortar business where long term rankings will be particularly beneficial.

This second site won’t simply be a second site for his business, I believe that search engines are smart enough to pick up on things like two websites in the first page of results having the same contact details, addresses etc. This site will simply consist of half a dozen well written and researched articles on the niche in question, with no outgoing links.

The important thing to keep in mind whilst building this second site is to keep it completely un-connectable to the first site. This means:

• Don’t use the same registrar to register the domain name
• Don’t use the same contact details to register the domain name (private registration with a different registrar is good)
• Don’t use the same Google Analytics account to track the site’s statistics.
• Whilst you could probably get away with hosting the site on the same IP as the original site (resellers host thousands of sites on the same IP, so the search engines can’t be sure that sites of a similar subject on the same IP are owned by the same person), it’s probably better to host this site on a different IP or hosting account from the original.
• Try to avoid using the exact same anchor text as you’ve used for the original site when gathering links.
• Don’t use the same web template as you used on the original site.
• Don’t place contact details on the second site.

Once we’ve written our articles and published the site, we start promoting the site in exactly the same way, in exactly the same places where we promoted the original sites:

• We write half a dozen more good quality articles and submit them to article directories
• We hit up our 1,000 or so link directories and drop our links on them (this is a good one to outsource - 1,000 submissions can be bought for around $70, but I find that they can be a bit hit and miss as far as accuracy goes)
• We hit up all the same blogs we did with the original site and start commenting on them using the new site as our URL

Over time, when our page reaches the first page in the search results (or even the second page), we drop a single, good anchor text sitewide link to our original site.

……and wait and see if this link is enough to tip us over into the top spot in the rankings.