Some advice Lisa

webdev · #1 (**permalink**) 04-25-2007, 02:57 PM

I posted this over at SBI MKL forums

Quote:

Hi All,

This is my first post here. I recently bought SBI! to built my new informational webiste on php, a web scripting language. I want to give my website a high visibility on the search engines however php is very common and famous topic. I want to built a php resource site with everything to tutorials, references, scripts and help. Last night i went through the brainstorming process. I have a list of about ~100 key words related to my site topic and theme. However all those key words are in high demand and high supply. For example if you query the keyword php arrays (without quote) in google, it will yield 1,970,000 pages and with quote 78,700 pages. How difficult would it be for me to score high for this keyword on search engines? Is it a cause for concern? I know the supply data yields results from pages which only contain the keyword in the page with no relevant information relating to it to what the user is looking for. How do you deal with a situation like this?

Webdev

and a person replied

Quote:

The important thing to consider here, as you indicated, is the relationship between the demand for your concept and the supply. I did a quick check and the supply is vast when compared to your demand...

I think it fair to assume that people writing on this topic must know what they are doing as this is not something that everyone is expert at. I would check the top sites to see if they have good information. All in all, it will be rough going to get to the top.

All the best,

Donald.

Quote:

Hey Donald,

Well, writing about the topic will not be a problem. I'm a professional php developer. I've lots of information on this topic already written out (which i did over the years) offline.

Regarding the keywords, i did some more experimentation. Using the free wordtracker suggestion tool, rephrasing the words seems to help. For example, "php forms" has google supply of 104,000 and the google supply of keyword "free php forms" is 9. However, the demand for both keywords (using the free wordtracker tool) yields 24 searches. So, i may have to look for the mix of right key phrases to come up with alternate keywords which are high in demand but low in supply. Using "free php forms" may be an advantage for me in the longer run as well since it contains "php forms".

PHP is a vast searched topic on the net. My only concern is that will if i be able to rank high over a period of some time. I would be bonus if i can get high rank quickly but my goal is to get somewhere on top eventually after sometime.

In a situation like this, what should you do? Change my site concept? Maybe lok for a sub-theme with in php. Not sure, if going with this theme and keywords going to be a gamble?

So i wanted to ask you Lisa or anyone who can advice me. Do you think this is doable? I mean will i be able to gain some traffic with time? If my content is attarctive i may even have people come back to my site and may gain good postioning over time? If i'm facing a supply of 10k -100k pages with my tier 2 and 3 keywords, how strong of a competetion is that? and if gaining good position in search engines going to be possible in my case?

lisa · #2 (**permalink**) 04-25-2007, 03:36 PM

Hey Webdev,

First of all don't get too bogged down in the numbers. While the brainstorming tool provides a good starting point to figure out supply and demand, I wouldn't shy away from certain topics unless the supply greatly outweighs the demand. It's hard to say what number is best because just because there's a lot of supply doesn't necessarily mean you won't get good traffic.

Here's an example... my SBI! site is #1 in Google for "flat stomach" (no quotes) and there are 2 million people targeting that phrase (supply). So the numbers were stacked against me but I kept building content, writing articles, etc. until I made it to #1.

The person who replied made a good suggestion. Look at your competitors (people who rank high for keywords you are targeting). Are their sites useful? One thing I noticed when I was coming up with my fitness site is that most of the top 10 sites were articles or very small sites with very little data.

If you are planning to build the biggest site possible on PHP and do something your competitors aren't doing then I say go for it.

Also remember this. Once you start building articles, your tier 2 and tier 3 pages will also get quite a bit of traffic so you will rank high for all kinds of different PHP related phrases. I have a tier 2 page that almost gets more entry traffic than my homepage.

So to answer your question, yes... I think you can get traffic as long as you offer something different than everyone else is offering with their site. But don't shoot for a generic keyword like "PHP" by itself. Go after "PHP tutorials" or "PHP help" or whatever. And as you start building content you will begin showing up for thousands upon thousands of different keywords thanks to your tier 2 and tier 3 pages.

I have tier 2 and tier 3 pages with over 100K supply and I'm #2, #3 for several of them in various search engines. Remember the engines look at the BIG picture. It's not just about the keywords your targeting but it's how many other people are linking to you, how much content is on your domain, and Google can even tell how long people stay on your site.

Hope that helps!

webdev · #3 (**permalink**) 04-25-2007, 05:30 PM

Thast's exactly what i think, that over time as i built content, people start recognizing the site as a good source, while giving me inbound links and the pages will start to rank high as a result. But from the reply of that gentlemen, it almost sounded to me that he was telling that this is not going to work since there is too much supply and not enough demand (maybe people at SBI believe that high demand and low supply is the only way to go). Anyhoo, great advice. I was a bit discouraged but i know there is still room out here for my site theme to score high given i play all the cards right.

lisa · #4 (**permalink**) 04-25-2007, 06:13 PM

Nope...if that was the case I would have had to scrap my site and pick something else. LOL The numbers weren't really in favor for me either when I created my site and I just hit the 4,000 unique visitor mark today with a topic that was pretty competitive according to Brainstorm It!.

So while it's a great tool to use as a guideline, the real key is your content. Now if you see that there are hundreds of people with sites exactly like you plan to create then that's a different story. But the reason I chose my theme is that I didn't see anything else out there like what I planned to do. I guess you could say I was a little cocky and believed I could outrank my competitors.

And it worked!

lisa · #5 (**permalink**) 05-05-2007, 07:51 AM

So Webdev,

How's the site going?

webdev · #6 (**permalink**) 05-05-2007, 10:09 AM

Hey Lisa,

The site is making progress. I've 3 pages so far. I used my custom template. (speaking of which i have to reply to the my other thread on custom templates and explain how i did it. its not hard thou).

I ran into few hurdle in the beginning but i'm learning the SBI tools as i go. So far so good.

My goal is to add one page each day for the next 20 days. After that i will reflect back and review my content once again before starting the website promotion process, posting articles, getting inbound links, etc, etc. I'm going to continue adding more pages with content there after (so far it looks like im going to have 200+ pages and that's my long terms goal. 200+ good content pages.). But for now i'm just focusing on building my first 20 so pages with good content. Moving forward one step at a time: )

lisa · #7 (**permalink**) 05-05-2007, 10:28 AM

Whoo hoo! Sounds like you are on the right track. I'm so happy for you. You're aiming for 200+ pages of content... that is awesome. And when you break it down to manageable goals like that is seems much easier. Great idea. You are going to pass me up quickly! I only have 35 or 40 pages in nearly 2 years. (I'm slacking! LOL) I bet there aren't many PHP sites out there with that much content so that's great!

Can't wait to read about your success story.

WB Sponsors