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SEO Secrets - Fighting Against the Domain Age Tide
By Andy Lunt (c) 2010

So you've bought your Dreamweaver, an eternity later worked out
how it works, started to build your site which is targeting your
chosen niche or promoting your affiliate product and after what
seems like forever you have added quality content. You've bust a
gut to get this far, but this is where the real work begins. You
need to get your site seen by as many people as possible. You
need to drive as much traffic as you can whether it be through a
pay-per-click campaign or via organic traffic.

Let's say you decide to target organic traffic. You need to get
a high ranking in the search engines. During your website
construction you have already been using a keyword research tool
and a SEO Tool and spending the midnight hours mulling over the
chosen keyword phrases your research has indicated you should be
targeting on your pages and using in your URL. Your whole site
from headings to meta-tags, to meta-descriptions and anchor text
are all optimized taking account of semantically related words,
keyword density and the long tail.

Next you begin your back link campaign spending hours trying to
get quality back links to your site. Social bookmarking takes
over your life for days on end, you post on relevant blogs and
all relevant forums, you set up your own blog, submit articles
to article directories and then submit your entire site to SEO
friendly website directories.

Yet more analysis follows, as you now study your competitors'
websites. You investigate what keywords they are targeting and
study the links that they have developed and you develop
strategies to be better than they are. Slowly but surely your
site climbs the rankings. You constantly update your site adding
quality content and before you know it your site is fast
approaching the first page. A steady trickle of traffic flows on
a daily basis. At this rate you should soon be top of the
rankings and then .... the sky's the limit!

Unfortunately it doesn't usually quite work like this. Yes it is
true that if you have picked some long tail keywords to target
you may be able to get somewhere near the top of the rankings or
indeed even to the number one spot. In most instances however
the traffic won't be great and you would need to get each page
of your website targeting a different long tail phrase and
getting to the top of the rankings for that phrase each time for
the total traffic to be lucrative. It's certainly possible but
does require a lot more graft.

For very popular keyword phrases it proves incredibly difficult
to dislodge the top sites from their positions, even though in
theory you may know that you have better back links and better
content. Without the top positions the mass traffic will never
be yours. It is just so frustrating as you probably know. I
certainly do. So you go away and you research again and you
analyze again and you spend days poring over the detail and you
work and you work and you know what, it makes not one jot of
difference. You just cannot crack the top spots. Why not? How
many times have I asked this of myself?

Now perhaps your tactics aren't quite right. Perhaps the phrases
you are targeting are the wrong ones or perhaps you're back
links are not quality back links. Do you have the quality of
content on your site that you think you do? Yes, yes, yes, I
hear you say. So what is going on? Well it could be something as
simple as the age of your domain.

Google places a lot of trust in back links, especially quality
back links to your site, but it also places significant trust in
sites which have been around for a significant period of time.
This is especially true if they are frequently updated. In many
cases the top ranked sites are trusted sites as far as Google is
concerned because they have an authority status due to their
back links, but also due to the length of time they have been
operating. If your site is an equal to a competitor's site in
terms of content and back links, but it is a far newer domain,
there will be little chance of you dislodging your competitor
from the top slot. The site that has been there for five years
serving the web community carries a lot of trust with Google.

To dislodge these sites requires tremendous effort to create
quality back links and sometimes you may never achieve it. It
can be done however, you just need to be aware of what is going
on and keep persevering. Some internet marketers have resorted
to buying old domains in an attempt to overcome this challenge
in building the website around the domain. I'm not entirely sure
how Google reacts to this, especially if you are adding new
content on a continual basis. Does the domain itself carry an
inherent trust because of its age or is it the content that
carried the trust from the old website?

Either way it's worth exploring as one of the tactics along with
keyword analysis and building back links that you could adopt in
an attempt to get higher rankings and hence higher rates of
traffic.
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Andy Lunt is an internet marketer who concentrates largely on
organic traffic and the techniques needed to drive this traffic
to various sites. If you want to learn how to find lucrative
keywords that make money then you need the best keyword tools
possible. Take a look at the options at
http://www.keyword-selectortool.com
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