…And now for an entirely speculative post regarding the mysterious and ever changing Google search algorithm.

Take a look at any webmaster forum these days and you will find a whole lot of people hooting and hollering about negative SERP movement. Panda this, panda that, panda hit me with a wiffle ball bat. In the past few months, Google’s tinkering and pandaneering has had a major impact on the current search results and caused some of the most experienced SEO wizards to question their own strategies.

Personally, I have seen a lot of movement as well. Luckily, my lack of focus has left me with a truckload of websites in various niches on which I have used vastly different link building strategies on. So, while some of my winners became losers, some of my losers became winners, and kingofsp lives to blog another day.

Now, the more disciplined forum posters and of course the case-study gurus at places like SEOmoz are having a field day examining data and attempting to uncover the mysteries of this problematic panda. Everyone is looking for the common traits of affected websites to shed light on what factors (whether on page or off) are causing some websites to be slapped into oblivion.

And now for my speculation…

If I were Google

No, that is not an homage to OJ Simpson. I’m just saying, whenever it comes to matters of search engine algorithmic policy, the most logical way to start reverse engineering a search engine is to put yourself in the shoes of the engineer and think about what you would do in order to achieve a level playing field where dastardly marketers like us would have a real hard time gaming the system and user experience would benefit.

So, let’s say I’m Joe Google, and I am tasked with making the Panda update one that will cripple the “SEO industry” (since you know they hate us anyway). I know that if I make an obvious tweak like making all sites with a buttload of profile links become slapped out of the top 1000, it will only be a matter of time before the case study heroes figure that out and the information propagates like a virus across all of the SEO resources. So, what I would want to do is basically confuse the fuck out of everyone.

Website Grouping
Each time Google’s robots discover/index a new website, simply place it into one of several groups. Let’s say groups A-S. Make it so that each group has a similar yet unique set of rules that govern what overall “score” the site gets which will determine how it ranks with other sites.

For instance, let’s say Group C places a special importance on anchor text diversity. Over anchor-text optimization in Group C sites will results in -25 points from the overall quality score. Whereas over anchor-text optimization in sites belonging to Group L might only result in -10 points from the overall quality score.

You use the same basic principles that have already been in play, you just change the value for each item. On-page optimization is of higher importance for sites in Group D than those in Group F. Amount of unique content is hardly as important for Group M sites as it is for Group A, and so on.

Obviously it would be a little bit more complex than that to implement, but you get the general idea. The result is an algorithm that still values and rewards quality websites with a healthy SEO strategy, but it becomes nearly impossible to game. Consequently, a million case studies and a billion moaning and groaning forum posts appear. The only option left for webmasters is to actually create websites with value, which is what Google has yearned for all along.

Back to Reality

I have yet to seduce a Google employee, so this of course is still pure speculation. It’s just an idea I had and felt like bloggin’ about it. Hopefully some of you find it interesting.

Oh, and Google, you’re welcome. My min salary is $750,000/year. I will be telecommuting. Use the contact form if you have any questions. Thank you.

Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps not. Maybe you’ve heard people in the SEO community refer to “ALN” and had no idea what they were talking about. Well, in this post, I’m going to shed a bit of light and offer my thoughts on this particular “link network” after having tinkered with it.

Some time ago, I blogged about the pros and cons of blog networks, and I went into some detail about blog networks in general. Authority Link Network (aka “ALN”) is basically a blog network, but it is unlike any other one I’ve ever used. The main thing that sets ALN apart from the other ones I’ve tried in the past is that along with the paid option you would expect, there is also a “free” option.

Yes, the quotation marks around the word “free” imply that there is a catch. However, it’s a pretty dang neat catch. If you want to get access to ALN without paying, you simply have to add a blog or two of your own to the network. This pretty brilliant system makes it so that fresh, quality blogs are constantly being added to the network. Naturally, there are some guidelines for sites that are submitted to be accepted.

Criteria
- You can only submit sites that are built on the WordPress CMS, version 2.6 or newer. If you are running older versions than 2.6, finding a good blog network is probably the least of your problems.

- The “Hello World” default WordPress post must be removed. No brainer.

- The default blogroll must also be removed. Sorry, I know you like linking to WordPress Planet whenever possible.

- XML-RPC must be enabled. If you don’t know what this is, it doesn’t matter. Just go to the “Writing” section under the “Settings” tab in your WordPress backend area and click the box to enable it.

- The blog can’t exist in a subdomain or a subdirectory. It needs to be on the root of the site.

- You must use any theme OTHER than the default WordPress theme on the site. Don’t be lazy.

- Have multiple categories (every post shouldn’t be posted under “uncategorized”).

- The site MUST be PR1 or higher. PR0 sites are not accepted. Also, if you are submitting a site with a TLD other than any of the following: .com .net .org .info .co .ca .me .us .biz .co.uk .com.au .net.au .ws and .t, it will basically count as only half of a regular submission.

If it seems like they are a bit picky, that’s because they are. The strict guidelines help ensure that the network isn’t clogged up with a bunch of junk sites. There are some other obvious rules (you can’t remove articles/links that have been posted to your sites) and a few not-so obvious rules. You’ll have to read through their FAQ for detailed info.

If you don’t want to bother with adding your own sites to the network, there is always the paid option. The cheapest plan (called the “Basic” plan) currently costs $14.95/mo. Considering the quality of the sites on this network versus most of the networks I’ve seen/used, I think that’s an extremely reasonable price.

Click here to get started with ALN.

For those of you who managed to arrive at this blog without any prior knowledge of Drip Feed Blasts (DFB), check out this post about its first incarnation. Otherwise, continue getting your read on.

I was one of the few fortunate enough to invited to alphatest DFB 2.0. Eagerly, I accepted. The enhancements I discovered blew my mind.

In the past, when you thought of DFB, you thought of a user-friendly, convenient and professional Xrumer blasting solution. Somehow, between the span of 1.0 and 2.0, it became so much dang more. Two new major features include:

Social Bookmarking
That’s right. You can now schedule social bookmarking blasts. 100 bookmarks per day, per link unit. I’ll talk more about link units later.

This feature almost made me wet my pants. Never before has it been so easy to give sites/pages a quick bookmarking boost. What’s even better is that DFB 2.0 allows you to input spintax in every type of link blast. That means I can generate UNIQUE bookmarks, time and time again. Holy moly. Titles as well as descriptions can be spun to your heart’s content. Upon viewing my reports, the links were all good. All of them.

Directory Submissions
With the same ease as social bookmarks, you can use DFB 2.0 to schedule directory submission blasts. Yes, you may also use spintax. Due to the nature of most directories, you’re obviously not going to get immediate results like you do with profile links or social bookmarks, but as long as you make your titles and descriptions not look like poo, they will most likely get approved eventually (if not automatically).

And of course, DFB is still the #1 profile link building (xrumer) solution. I wouldn’t leave it to anyone else.

Poor India. First PayPal screws them over, now this. Of course, there are still some worthwhile SEO services offered by the best of the best (Amit aka Red_Virus comes to mind), but for rudimentary SEO work, DFB 2.0 just made everything a whole hell of a lot easier.

How I Use it
Most of the e-mails I get are from novice to intermediate SEOers who are looking for more specificity in how I go about optimizing my sites, particularly in the off-site department. It used to be a long winded, complicated response (which I was often too lazy to provide). Nowadays, it’s somewhat simpler.

First of all, you’re not going to get rich by using DFB alone. Get that delusion right out of your head. However, I will say that it is the ONLY subscription based SEO service that I currently use.

The formula is simple:

1. Good, exclusive backlinks.
2. Support system of DFB backlinks
3. Decent website/niche
4. PROFIT$$$$

Notice the lack of question marks.

Number 1 is of course the more difficult part. That is where your own creativity and social engineering come into play.

Number 2 is only a matter of signing up for DFB.

Number 3 is your problem, bro.

Calendar Scheduling
DFB 2.0 features calendar scheduling as well as regular daily scheduling. Daily scheduling is now referred to as the “loop.” Blasts in the loop will continue running daily. However, if a blast is scheduled on the calendar, it will take priority over the loop. Once the calendar blast(s) is/are completed, the loop will resume.

Oh yeah, link units…

Previously, DFB power users had to manage multiple accounts, which meant logging in and out, multiple usernames + passwords, etc. Those dog days are over. DFB 2.0 incorporates “link units.” A link unit basically serves the same purpose as a separate account on the old system. Each link unit is worth either 1k profile links, 100 social bookmarks, or 150 directory submissions per day. Since there is not an infinite pool of pligg sites or web directories, each social bookmarking blast can only be run 3 times (per URL) and each directory submission blast can be run 4 (per domain).

Also, I would like to add that the new interface is fantastic. Campaign management is about as easy as it gets. I would like to take partial credit for that, as an alphatester. Even though I probably didn’t help that much.

Results
If a service doesn’t provide results, I do not continue using it. That’s pretty elementary. I have been a DFB subscriber for over a year now. I am particularly fond of the new social bookmark system. Every time I schedule a blast a see at least some positive movement for that particular URL within a week or so. Sometimes very significant movement. I typically do two days at a time. Obviously there are a ton of factors and my results are very specific to my own sites, but for whatever reason people always want to hear stuff like that…so there you go.

One last thing: I was not commissioned to write this post/review. I just appreciate a quality SEO service when I find one (which is not often). You are now excused to check out the new DFB for yourself.

A lot of my “real life” friends are engineers. Mostly mechanical engineers, but one is a software engineer. Often times I feel excluded because I am in a room full of engineers and I stand alone as a filthy capitalist. But then one day it hit me: I am an engineer.

When I first heard about “social engineering” it was in the context of phishing passwords on MySpace. Not very glamorous. However, it recently occurred to me that a lot of my SEO efforts can actually be classified as social engineering. More specifically, methods such as this or this. Those are just two examples of methods I use that I have detailed on this site. It really only scratches the surface as far as what you can do when you really put your mind to acquiring links by thinking outside of the box. Especially if you don’t mind being a little sneaky about it.

Am I saying that I go around creating fake online personalities and use them to gain access to websites that I will somehow exploit? No. I’m also not saying that I don’t!

The same software engineer I mentioned earlier recently explained to me that a lot of cases you hear about in the media relating to big companies having their security compromised are actually due to social engineering. It is more likely that someone somehow found a vulnerability on the inside (such as a clueless secretary with too much access) than a white van full of hackers in black jumpsuits plugging mysterious boxes into the back of the building.

You are always going to have competitors that are buying rankings. They will buy directory submissions, social bookmarks, regular old paid links, all that good stuff. Stuff that most of us do. By applying and creating social engineering link building methods (and succeeding) in addition to those standard methods, your competition doesn’t have a chance. Unless they evolve to that level, they simply have no access to the type of valuable links that are available. Then they go and make excuses to their clients (probably something about domain age or page loading speeds).

Perhaps you’re hoping I’m going to get a little bit more specific? Well, I think that would sort of defeat the purpose of what I’m saying here. This is a public blog, after all. I’m talking about using that big old brain of yours to come up with social engineering methods to acquire links that no one else can get. Just focus on whatever website it might be that you want to get a backlink on, and figure it out. Granted, some feats would be dang near impossible. If you can get a footer link on Google’s home page, then I will assume blackmail or something highly illegal was involved. But there are vulnerabilities everywhere. Don’t get discouraged, get excited.

In conclusion: Knowing how to use automated/paid links properly is still a very powerful weapon in your arsenal. However, without getting those few precious authority links that the other, inferior SEOs cannot access, it’s going to be a long and unexciting ride trying to make a buck, if you’re playing in anything remotely competitive.

Of course, you could always create incredible original content and optimize user experience to the point where people just can’t help but link to your site…but who has the time for that?

Like most of my ideas for posts, this one came from a thread on Wickedfire. My response there was short, but don’t worry, I have reserved my unnecessarily detailed and long-winded response for my blog!

First off, I know there are still some of you that don’t understand the value of Wikipedia links. I’m not even going to try to convince you otherwise. You’re better off just changing your mind right now and going with it. Yes, they will bear the “nofollow” attribute. If you don’t believe in the power of nofollow links (especially from an authority page), then you may return to digital point and go about your business.

Also, let’s not forget that in many cases, a well-placed Wikipedia place will result in targeted referral traffic.

Okay, so here are the simplified steps:

1) Find a recent, relevant news publication. I prefer interviews, because you can include a quote from the interview in the Wikipedia page you’re targeting.

2) Post this story on your site. A re-written copy will have a better chance of success, but I’ve also had links to stories I just copy + pasted stick for months and months (with no end in sight).

3) Do not put any ads/affiliate links on this page.

4) Place your link using proper formatting as a reference. If you don’t know how to properly format a Wikipedia link, see their documentation on this subject.

5) Do not do this repeatedly from the same IP within a short period of time.

After the dust has settled (perhaps a month or so), you may want to get a little ballsy and put ads/affiliate links on the page. Or, if you want to be more conservative about it, just enjoy the visitors you receive and the SE credibility of having sticky inbound links from Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia does have editors. Some of them take more pleasure than others in being hall monitors and looking for links to delete. Also, pages related to certain high-competition niches are monitored a bit closer than others, since they are frequent spam targets. Try to find creative ways to fly under the radar. There are currently nearly 76 million Wikipedia pages indexed on Google, so, they can’t find everything. And even if they do, if you have followed the steps above, your link has the best chance of not being cock-blocked.

Oh, and one more tip…internal linking on Wikipedia is obviously very important and powerful. It’s also a lot easier to get away with dropping a link to another Wikipedia page than it is to an external site. So, if you don’t have any luck getting a link to stick on the high-profile page you’re originally targeting, you might want to consider dropping the link on a related but less desirable/less monitored page. That should be easier to stick, and once it does, you can work on building backlinks to the page from other, more authoritative Wikipedia pages to enhance the power of your link.

Okay. That’s all. More beer now.

The reason I’m posting this is because I’m tired of explaining this to people in my every day life that come to me with similar stories. From this point on, I can just link them to this article.

Okay, for those of you that make a living selling SEO services to businesses, I apologize. If it’s any consolation, the odds of you pitching a business owner who has read this blog post will be slim to none!

Recently, I was chatting with a middle-aged DUI attorney in a hot tub up in Mammoth. As we all know, hot tubs are where all the most important networking happens. Naturally, we got to talking about our respective lines of work. As it turned out, he was about as interested in the world of SEO as I was in the details of how to get out of a DUI. An enthusiastic, drunken conversation followed.

Real quick, for those of you wondering, his advice to anyone that gets pulled over while intoxicated is to refuse the breathalyzer, refuse the field sobriety test, and let them take you to the station and blood test you. This may be common knowledge to some of you, but it was golden info to me! Basically following that procedure makes it infinitely easier for your attorney to get you out of the dang thing. Not that I think any of you are irresponsible enough to drink and drive…I digress.

He Spends a Shitload on SEO with Minimal Results

Like many other business owners, he figured this was just the nature of the SEO beast. I’m sure his SEO company reinforced this notion whenever he voiced any concern.

So, here is what I told Bob:

Bob, if your SEO company has the skill set to rank you or anyone for competitive attorney-related keywords, then why are they spending so much time and energy looking for people like you willing to pay them to do it, even though they can’t guarantee results? Fundamentally, doesn’t make much sense. If you can efficiently rank semi-competitive terms on the Googlez, you can make more money than the monthly fee you would charge an attorney.

Bob’s response: ahhhhhhh.

To be fair, there is a lot of money to be made in selling SEO services. After all, it is a seller’s market. It is also very scalable. But that doesn’t mean it is going to benefit business owners in a significant way. So, what can business owners do?

Business Owners are Best Suited to SEO Themselves

Like I told Bob, and like most of you know, it’s all about inbound links. Sure there are dozens of other important factors, but nothing can touch the significance of quality inbound links. For you business owners that may be confused, inbound links = links to your website on other websites. No time to get into the reason and rhyme behind it. Just accept it.

Let’s say you hire me to improve your company’s ranking for “nail polish remover.” What am I gonna do? I’m going to outsource generic link-building all over the place and charge you a huge premium for it. Will your rankings improve? Probably a bit. Will you experience the sort of results I led you to dream about when I was pitching my service? Probably not. The reason for this is that the links I will be acquiring for you will be cheap, weak links that anyone with a lot of time or $ on their hands can gather in large quantities. But these types of links generally won’t create big, sustainable ranking improvements.

I Can Has Good Links?

Yes, most likely, you can has. Especially if you’ve been in your current business for a while. Why? Because chances are, you’ve already made valuable contacts and have opportunities to get links that no one else could grab. Think about the other companies you routinely do business with. How many of them have established websites? How is your relationship with them? Would they be willing to link to your site with the anchor text “nail polish remover?”

These links are infinitely more valuable. In most cases they are from very relevant, often aged sites with minimal outbound links. And they definitely aren’t linking to random skin care, get rich quick, or get a bigger dick sites.

Sure, if you have a really good SEO company, they will work with you to attempt to get these links, but most won’t. And even the ones that do are most likely going to charge you an arm and a leg to do it.

My advice if you’re hellbent on enlisting outside SEO services: go ahead and hire whichever SEO company has the shiniest graphics on their site, and let them do the supplemental link building, ALONG with shaking down your friends and colleagues with websites to give you those precious exclusive links.

Quick SEO Checklist for Business Owners:

• •Get those dang links.
• •Optimize your site title with whatever term you’re trying to rank for. In other words, the title of the home page in the top of your browser should be “nail polish remover.” Not “home”!
• •The text used to link to your site, aka “anchor text”, is important. You want it to be a healthy combination of the term you’re trying to rank for and variatons of that term. For example, “nail polish remover”, “buy nail polish remover”, “ethyl acetate”, etc.
• •Send me 60% of quarterly profits.

Oh, by the way, Bob, here is the whole concept of this post put into action: Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer. Heh!

You may recall a post of mine not too long ago about using Google Insight to find hot new niches. The site I’m about to talk about was originally built because of that same simple method. I recently sold it, so I thought I would immortalize its memory by making this post.

Out of consideration for the new owner, I’m not going to discuss the niche or show the URL here. If you are dying of curiosity, message me for more info. But for goodness sakes, don’t obsess about niche specifics. Find your own gold!

I will now detail exactly what I did to quickly rank n’ bank with this one. I will assume you read the post about Google Insight, so we will skip that step. Actually, that’s not even a step, that’s a pre-step. So, here we go:

Step One – Building a Product Filled Site
Using PhpBay for WordPress, it is easy to create lots and lots of pages with stuff your visitors are hopefully looking for. Because PhpBay results are html based, the SE’s still see it as unique(ish) content. You can tweak the settings so that duplicate results are omitted, adding to its uniqueness. I use a WP plugin called Duplicate Post to make it easy to create lots of similar pages where I may just be making one small tweak from the original (i.e., red widget to blue, to yellow, etc). I ended up with something like 300 different product pages, the vast majority of which contained no content other than the relevant listings pulled from Ebay. The ever popular All in One SEO plugin was used to take care of on-site SEO.

3 pages of additional relevant content without any product listings were added and linked to in the sidebar. The Google XML Sitemap plugin was used to generate a sitemap which was linked to in the footer.

Step Two – Disregard Team Fortress 2, Acquire Links
Keep in mind that we are trying to rank n’ bank here, not necessarily build a site for long-term revenue. Then again, sometimes you get long-term revenue anyway, but for all intents and purposes, I was looking for short-term gains here. Because of this, a hefty dose of dodgy link building was applied.

Utilizing my 2k links/day Drip Feed Blasts subscription, I blasted 2k direct profile links per week to the site. Thanks to the set-it-and-forget-it nature of DFB, this was easily achieved with minimal effort. I also ran Drip Feed Login regularly. If you’re familiar, DFL is a program included with a DFB subscription (are you keeping up?) that you install locally on your machine and run that periodically logs into the xrumer generated profiles created by DFB, causing links to your profiles to appear on the homepages of the respective forum targets where it shows the users currently online. Pretty neat, right??

I used a couple different blog networks to generate around 300 in-content links in various spun articles.

I suppose I should have mentioned earlier that the domain was a hyphenated EMD (exact match domain). I used very little anchor text variation in most of the links I generated. Mostly singular/plural versions of the main keyword.

I spent probably an hour at most doing manual blog commenting. I used two relevant sites of my own to link to the new site from their respective sidebars.

Total Time Spent
Had I had known I was going to blog about this site from the beginning, I guess I would have kept better records. Estimations will have to do.

I would say that total time spent from researching the niche, building the site, and building the links, I probably spent somewhere in the ball park of 6-8 hours.

Revenue
Prior to being sold the site was making a steady $400-$450 month. It sold for a little over 3 grand. The total revenue after the sale was $5,362.59.

Why Sell?
This is the main question I get when selling any site, and I take it as a compliment. Because of the niche, and despite the high volume of clicks it was sending to Ebay, the traffic was pretty low quality. I didn’t like running a campaign with Ebay with such a low EPC. So, I decided to cut it. But I think in the right hands it could be tweaked and made into something much better. You know, by someone willing to spend more than half a day on it.

I know this case study is not very organized and lacks fancy graphics. I probably left out something important, too. Feel free to ask any questions you may have below.

EDIT

Okay I forgot something many of you will probably find pretty important. The site IS currently sandboxed on Google. Not de-indexed, mind you, but it ranks on like page 10 or something for its main keyword. This sandboxing happened soon into the site’s life. It still received (and still receives) hundreds of unique visitors per day thanks to prominent rankings on Yahoo! and Bing.

Some backlinks of actual quality would probably easily revive the site on Google.

You like that stupid title? Yeah, I know you do!

Today I’m going to talk about blog networks. To be more specific, I’m going to talk about services offered that include multiple blog posts over a network of blogs all owned by the same person/company, with the aim of acquiring quality, in-content links from various web properties. As with pretty much all SEO services, there is plenty of garbage to separate from the gold. I’m going to talk about some qualifying factors I look for before choosing to use or not to use (or continue to use) a blog network service.

Footprints
If you’re buying 100 blog posts, the whole dang point is to make it appear to Google as if 100 different sites decided your site was worth mentioning. I cannot say with certainty exactly what factors are analyzed by Google in order to determine the uniqueness of any given group of sites. Anyone who tells you with certainty is either a liar or in breach of their NDA with Google and soon to lose their employment. However, we can use logic to determine what criteria should be met to ensure that the posts look unique in the eyes of Googlezilla:

• •Unique IPs – Most all services offer blog posts on sites hosted on unique C-class IPs (if they want to compete)
• •Unique Themes – Does using a small handful of themes over multiple sites necessarily make a blog network worthless? I’m my opinion, no. But I’m definitely willing to spend more money on a network that uses lots of unique themes.
• •Unique Content – Whether the articles are all hand-written (super expensive) or they are spun, you obviously want the articles to be unique.
• •Anchor Text/URL Diversity – This is very important to me. Not all blog network services offer a lot of flexibility in spinning your anchor text or URLs. In some cases you might not want to spin your URL, because you are only targeting one particular page. I understand that, but you should still be spinning your anchor text to some extent to make your links appear more natural.
• •TLD Diversity – Not a make or break quality, but I’m not willing to spend as much on a network of blog posts that are all on .info domains.

Shit That Pisses Me Off About Crappy Blog Networks
Obviously the goal of anyone who creates a blog network is to make money. That is all fine and dandy. The trouble comes about when sharp corners are cut to make the network more profitable. Here are some red flags that the blog network you are working with/considering working with is a steaming pile of poo:

• •Minimal Inbound Links – How hard is it to at least drip feed some links to your blogs so that those of us paying for posts on them might actually get a tasty drop of link juice out of them?
• •Pray for Indexing – Related to the above gripe, there are many crappy blog networks that simply do not get crawled because Google doesn’t give a flying fig about them. Why? AINT GOT NO LINKZ. Or worse yet, the domain was blacklisted a long time ago.
• •HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DOG AND MAKE HIM LOSE WEIGHT AND GROW HIS PENIS WITH MONEY MADE FROM FOREX INVESTING – Okay, if the network has a ton of posts not even remotely relevant to each other or the title of the site, I might still use it. But a niche specific network or a big network that gives you the flexibility to decide what category of sites you want your content on is worth infinitely more. Nobody wants their well written article posted right above some gibberish post about dick pills.

I have used a lot of different networks, this is true. Definitely more bad than good. To share all of the good ones would be shooting myself in the foot, but I will mention one that I used just recently that I’m quite satisfied with, offered by LinkMason. Visit the link for the details.

So, basically I got this far in the post, then got distracted by YouTube videos about that homeless guy with a radio announcer voice, and then got involved in a heated email thread with some friends, and now I’ve completely forgotten where I was going with this post (if anywhere), so I guess I’ll just stop now.

Happy New Year!

We may be well into November, but believe it or not, there is still time to take advantage of the huge surge of holiday spending online by establishing brand new sites and getting organic traffic.

Find the Golden Terms
Your first friend in this process is going to be Google Insights. Using this handy dandy tool, you’re going to want to search something general, such as “shoes” or “toys’ or whatever. Scroll down to the bottom of the results and you’ll see “Rising Searches”. Take a peek at them and see if anything looks interesting. You might want to avoid brand names…you might not. Depends how off-white your SEO hat is.

“Breakout” terms can be golden. They can also be crap. “Breakout” means that the term has recently experienced a surge in search volume of 5,000% or more. Of course, if it gets 2 searches a day, and then one day it got 100 for whatever reason, it will be labeled a “breakout” term.* Do a little research before you go domain crazy. Obviously some breakout keywords are next to worthless (especially with small search volume) while some may be worthwhile. Some breakout terms and the terms that show 200-500% increase (or more) are going to be the money makers.

Try to Snag Them
You might be surprised how easy it is to find available .coms for some of these terms since they may have only recently landed on the radar. Take your list of prospects to Namecheap (the promo code this month is FAMILYWARMTH) and see what you can find.

Build Links, Utilize the Boost before the Deadly Dance
If you’ve ever built/ranked a site in your life, you know that new sites are usually easy to quickly rank for their targeted term (assuming it’s not crazy competitive), at least in the short-term. It is very common for new sites to hang out on the 1st page for a few days or a few weeks before Google asks it to dance. The “dance”, of course, is the endearing term that has come to represent the seemingly random and chaotic position changes that can occur shortly after a new site gets indexed and ranked. Depending on your link building techniques and consistency, the site may settle back down on the 1st page (possibly in an even better position), or it may be cast out to page 24 where it will shrivel and die. In some rare cases, new sites like this actually hit the front page and stick for the long-term. But, that’s besides the point…

The idea is to build sites around these trending keywords, throw them together quickly, slap on some monetization such as Adsense/Amazon/EPN, whatever, and milk that honeymoon traffic you get. You want to try to time it so that your site attains that initial favorable position in the middle of the online shopping frenzy that happens at the end of this month well into the middle of December. So, the time to start building is NOW.

If you need link building ideas, they are all over this site. I know my navigation sort of sucks. Think of it as a barrier for entry.

And, of course, if the site you build is halfway decent, perhaps you can continue expanding it and by the time the next holiday season rolls around you can put it to even better use.

*I take no responsibility if I fucked up my math somehow