SEO is a waste of time… What?? This proves it’s not! »

Man, I was checking the stats for one of my own websites as a routine that I have every Monday… and I saw something pretty damn crazy on there that I wanted to share.

One of the sites I run is a real estate investing website that focuses on helping new and struggling investors begin investing the RIGHT WAY. As you probably know, I’m a very part time real estate investor and invest in multi-unit real estate. So, I pass on what I know and help my readers sift through the crap that is on the net and find the truly actionable, truthful, honest, unbiased, and up to date information and resources that will help them succeed… not just line the pockets of gurus.

(sorry… I’ll get off my soapbox for a sec

Anyhow, back to the SEO story…

Okay, I was checking out my stats today and was expecting to see the main search terms referring traffic to be a ton of long-tail terms that I optimize my site and each post for. Hey, that’s what I’ve been focusing on because the generic search term “real estate investing” is one of the more competitive search terms out there… truthfully… I really think it would be a waste of my time to concentrate a ton on ranking high for that search term.

Well…

I come to find that over the past week or so I have been pulling a bunch of traffic from the search term “real estate investing” from Google.

So, like any curious internet entrepreneur would do… I headed over to Google to see what I was ranked for that term.

I couldn’t believe my eyes!

Here’s a screen shot of the actual Google search. (my site is www.thereibrain.com)

The term “real estate investing” is a huge search term w/ over 30 million competing pages and has been dominated by Creonline and REIclub for probably the past 5 years at least. Those two sites have been around since the late 90’s and early 00’s… so Google likes that they’ve been around for a while.

But…

My site just passed the 1.5 year mark a little while back (might be closer to 2 years… don’t remember) and has been doing very well in a ton of long-tail search terms that I have optimized the content for.

How the Sites Been Doing Recently…

The past 6 months The REI Brain has been growing pretty damn well. Traffic has almost doubled every month since January and I attribute that to my highly targeted articles… and the use of social media as of late.

But… up until I noticed my #3 ranking in Google for real estate investing… I haven’t touched higher than the 3rd page for that same search term.

I don’t keep up on the Google algorythim changes a whole lot… I feel that if you put out a ton of awesome content… give the readers awesome value for their time… that other bloggers and websites will link to your site because of the content… and Google will love it for that reason.

Google’s whole aim is to provide the user (one doing the search) with the best quality experience.

This includes:

• The most relevant and timely organic search results
• The most relevant and useful ads
• The results that Google feels will help the reader best answer their question

When you concentrate on #1, providing awesome and timely content… then #2 optimizing it for the search engines… you’ll win.

How did I get this high ranking in such a competitive search term?

Well… to tell you the truth… I can start naming off the ninja techniques I’ve been doing recently…

… or I could tell you the truth and say, “I really don’t know why… maybe a new Google algo”.

All kidding aside, there are some reasons that Google would even consider my site as a top 10 site for real estate investing.

Here are my thoughts…

1. Truly, my site is an awesome resource and is updated on a consistent basis. It sets out to truly help people rather than to make me a ton of money. Google likes that sort of thing.
2. Lately, I‘ve been writing some posts that have been getting linked to a lot on the blog… which would trickle down to the root domain (the root domain is the highly ranked page). Good content = incoming links = Google salivating over your content.
3. I optimized my internal link structure in January using some cool wordpress plugins like the alinks plugin
4. I started using social media big time in January to get the word out about the site.  People gravitate toward genuine content… and social media makes it easy for people to reward good work.  (I’ll write a post later on about how to do this…)

I want to give this a few weeks or a month or two to season on Google.  If it’s around next month at this time… I’ll feel confident that I should continue doing what I’ve been doing to get the word out about my content.

Just an FYI… this is all 100% white hat stuff.  No tricks… just giving awesome content… using simple on page optimization… using social media… and implementing some great internal linking (which I still have a ton I need to do) to make the entire site a bit more sticky and to get people and search engines to do deeper in to the site.

Easy as that.  Give people what they want… be of value, not a spammer w/ a motive… and the search results will find you.

I’ll keep you updated on the status of this ranking and let you know exactly what I’ve done (both on page and off) to get my websites (and my clients websites) where they are.