Mini-Sites Magic

In this article I am going to use my web site http://troubled-asset-relief-program.net as a case study in how to optimize an already successful page to boost its Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking. I suspect a lot of you are thinking that anyone daft enough to spend time optimizing a multi-hyphenated dot net domain probably hasn’t got a lot of useful information to share, so let me start my addressing that point…

This is an article on how to make a buck a day from a made-for-adsense mini-site, it’s not about building a brandable investment that’s going to set the world on fire. troubled-asset-relief-program.net has been hitting that revenue target day-in, day-out since November 2008, with virtually no work beyond the initial eight hour set-up, which consisted mainly of content generation.

A further eight hours work was spent in June 2009, and that is the meat of this Hub, so fast forward to the section on ‘The Second SERP Assault’ if you are busy!

I registered the domain back on 23^rd September 2008 to publish a made-for-adsense mini-site on the topic of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). With a small site like this you don’t want to pay any more than a registration fee, and with organic search engine traffic your main source of visitors the best domain to register is one that is an exact keyword match for the search term you are targeting, in this case, ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’.

I certainly recognize that troubled-asset-relief-program.net is one heck of an ugly name, and nobody is going to buy this domain for anything other than a low multiple of income. However, I think this low resale multiple is true of most mini-sites so didn’t consider it worth paying a premium to buy tarp.com or troubledassetreliefprogram.com in the aftermarket. If you are going to build a site to sell at a decent profit then a domain name like this wouldn’t work, but my site is just to generate modest income for an even more modest amount of work.

For the purposes of ranking in the search engines hyphens and a dot net do just fine. It is true that it may put off some people from clicking on to the site, but the only way I could have registered a dot com is by adding a word such as: troubledassetreliefprogramguide.com My judgment is that a long name like this would also be off-putting, and that an exact match in dot net is a better bet.

If you have any comments on my thought process please feel free to put them below.

There are plenty of articles about how to optimize a mini-site so I am not going to go over those here. It was just the usual – a Wordpress site, the all-in-one-SEO plugin, on-site SEO and decent content. One thing I didn’t do was target any backlinks, or undertake any article marketing. I relied on the power of the exact match domain name and the site’s content alone.

http://troubled-asset-relief-program.net/ is sitting on top of the first page of Google outranking two dot gov web sites for the keyword ‘troubled asset relief program’ and it has been glued there since October 2008 with virtually no changes to the site at all until the optimization undertaken in June 2009.

Really if you think about it the ranking is amazing considering the importance of the subject matter, and the masses of high authority news agencies that write about it on a daily basis. Some people say that an exact match domain is a small factor, but that has not been my experience with this and other sites – the big G loves exact match. It’s a significant factor in how little ‘ol me is ranking on the first page of Google for a major news story.

In June 2009 I decided to optimize the first page of the site to increase the flow of traffic. I want to share what I did at this time, because it is an area of SEO that is not discussed so much.

First of all I selected a series of related keywords that I selected using Google’s keyword tool:

1. troubled asset relief program banks
2. troubled assets relief program
3. troubled asset relief program bill
4. $700 billion troubled asset relief program
5. troubled asset relief program senate
6. tarp troubled asset relief program
7. troubled asset relief program act
8. troubled asset relief program law
9. text of troubled asset relief program
10. troubled asset relief program 2008
11. summary and analysis of the troubled asset relief program
12. the troubled asset relief program
13. treasury troubled asset relief program
14. treasury's troubled asset relief program
15. troubled asset relief program application

It is important to select words that include the original keyword and have words added either side.

I then rewrote the home page http://troubled-asset-relief-program.net/ to include these terms. For each term I wrote a short article at sites like http://ezinearticles.com/ that linked back to the home page using the keywords as anchor text. Finally you will see that I added a series of images using the keywords.

Also, I have taken time to request reciprocal links, but haven’t had much success as there are not many related sites. If you know of any please get in touch.

The results have been stunning, and you can see from the below that I am killing it on many of the terms. What this demonstrates is the power to leverage a successful page to dominate related keywords. Really that’s the main point of this article, sorry it took me so long to get there!

Is this really a success story?

With just 7 cents as the average CPC for most of the keywords it’s not something that most people would target. I capture only 15-20% of the average 8,100 monthly search volume for the keyword, and many people would suggest that time would be better spent on developing a single site of quality. I have to say that I tend to agree, because for every success like this I have another six or so mini-sites that flop.I got a bit lucky with this site because although the quoted CPC is 7 cents I get the odd one at $5 to $7 a click as it is a financial topic.

So when you read a success story like this don’t forget all the man hours spent on the failures that make it possible.

I’d be interested to hear your comments below.