SEO Happens - A Bump in the Road

So I had a follow up article for my previous blog post on finding a ClickBank  niche and it got deleted in a format of my hard drive as I reinstalled windows.

Before everybody starts jabbering about 'backing up your work' please keep in mind: I did back everything up and I'm just to lazy to retrieve it at this time. True story - happened right here in Baton Rouge.

Besides, I want to do something different.  I want to do a case study on SEO and PLR articles.  Yes, you heard me right and before anybody starts whining about duplicate content please here me out.

Let's Do an SEO Test on PLR Articles

So what is a PLR article? It's a private label rights article, which loosely translated is an article you can buy and get resale rights on. Do a quick search on google for PLR Articles and you'll get plenty of hits. You can find them for free also. Check out this database of PLR articles. 

Let's look at this free PLR article:

Title: Car Repair Prices Why Your Oil Change Is Never Just An Oil Change

First paragraph:
For a repair shop, there is little profit in the $29.95 oil change. By the time a shop pays its technician, pays for the oil, the filter, and the hazardous waste disposal fees, there’s no money left.

Copy and paste the first paragraph into Google and here are the search results:

Top 2 pages ranking for a copy and paste of first paragraph (they had to match the article):

http://www.barrtransmission.com/car-repair-prices-why-your-oil-change-is-never-%E2%80%9Cjust-an-oil-change%E2%80%9D

and

http://rivr.sulekha.com/adwords_1456180

Just a footnote...according to the second URL this article is about 11 years old! Wow...

Now this part of the test is really biased as Google is just looking for a match to what I put in for a search.

Looking at the copy the key word this article is trying to rank for is oil change.  It is mentioned 3 times, twice in the title, and once in the first paragraph plus it has the LSI keywords to back it up. So how do these websites rank for the word oil change across the net?  Let's find out...

I enter the URL of the first website in LinkAssistant's Rank Tracker

Since the website isn't mine I skip the second part

These are some of the keywords that Rank Tracker recommends

I noticed that in the list the keyword 'oil change' was not present and all the words it did list were not the ones I was looking for.  So I deleted all of these keywords and simply put the one word I was looking for in its place - oil change.

Final Result

The site is not ranking for the keyword oil change at all - at least not in the top 50.  Are there any backlinks to their pages contain this article? According to SEO SpyGlass the answer is no, however, looking at the base URL for http://www.barrtransmission.com/ the answer is 128 plus 56,100 more.

A lot of those links lead to 404 pages...Looks like this site use to sell products or offer digital downloads of the espanol variety.

The Test for PRL Ranking

The article is not half bad for an 11 year old piece of work.  It offers some common sense tips on changing oil.  If someone were to :

1. Put it on a car site

2. Add a table of contents with at least 1 heading containing the word "oil change"

3. Have another article on the website linking to it (contextual)

4. Add some pictures and a video of an oil change

5. A few backlinks from some medium to high DA sites?  Maybe?

We'll Never Know Unless We Try

In my next article we'll build that website I was talking about in my last article and also play around with the SEO PowerSuite a bit more.

Welcome to SEO Notes

I started this blog because I needed a place to sort out my thoughts. I don't even know where to start. Maybe the beginning will help…

Awhile back me and a friend of mine had an idea to buy a whole bunch of really good domain names, SEO the hell out of each website, and then throw in some Adsense, Amazon affiliate stuff or whatever to the pages and make a whole bunch of money online.  Sounds good, right?

Things didn’t exactly turn out that way…

I kept watching these guys on YouTube and they made it look so easy making a $2,500 on Instagram per day and even more on their YouTube channel and sky's the limit!

So I would try their techniques and and fail,  try again and fail...it really sucked

One of the techniques that I tried out actually didn't fail though it did exactly what it was supposed to do and that was making a new site which had different article headings like MSN’s lifestyle, money, health and fitness - stuff like that.

So I bought a domain, some semi expensive plug-ins from Themeforest, started blogging and it started drawing a lot of traffic and then it got hacked and it just never seemed to recover from that. Hostgator shut me down twice and I finally moved to a different provider. To this day I think it had a lot more to do with HostGator than it did me.

I had about 12 other domains but providing content and also entering into a category like diet and weight loss was a huge mistake.The diet and weight loss category for SEO and trying to get ranked on Google is super tough.

If you're just starting out in SEO work I would highly recommend finding a niche market and working with that first. Something with low competition but high traffic.

It would be different if you were part of a large company that had graphic artist, content creators IT department, web designers Etc. However most of us start out as a one man operation.  and buying content is expensive, as a lot of us start out on a shoestring budget.

Let's face it. In today's world where domains are super cheap, talent is super expensive.

You end up being the web designer,  the SEO guy, the analytics guy, the web console guy, the AdWords guy -  you have to do everything on your own.

It's tough work but worth it if you can stick it out. As for me I'll keep trudging along and follow my own advice... I'm going to find that niche market.