SEO Attempts, Failure and Learning from It

Many bloggers have failed at SEO before. This is not about when you started your career, but this is when SEO is like the back of your hand. When the time you were good enough to get sites ranked on page one. Here are the SEO Attempts, Failure, and Learning from It.

Let’s say this…
If you were able to rank a site on page 1 of Google for the term “ Online poker,” and then your rankings tanked. Not because of a Google penalty but from something you’ve never expected.

SEO Attempts, their Failure, and what can we learn from it

But before going into what’s learned, let’s first go over how it all started: SEO Attempts, Failure, and Learning from It.

Online Poker Lowdown

Back in 2010, this was an old poker site that was never really updated. It was called Online Poker Lowdown. Funny enough, the site is still up today, even though no one owns it.

It was bought because it ranked in the top 1,000 for the term “ Online poker.” The site just needed some updating.

Suppose you are wondering how they find it. That is because they search on Google for the term “ Online poker” and hit up a dozen or so sites that were ranking between page 30 and 100 for the term and bought the cheapest one.

It went after the poker industry because many bloggers thought this would be legalized in the United States back then. If this could rank at the top, You would have a site that would eventually be worth a lot of money if you were that patient.

One of the first blog post

This blog was published first back in November 2010. It was called the top 5 poker mistakes you’ll make.

The blog post wasn’t the standard 2,000 plus words written these days, but it was long enough for 2010. Keep in mind. There weren’t as many blogs s back then, so it wasn’t as competitive. Here are SEO Attempts, Failure, and Learning from It

The path to growing Online Poker Lowdown

Back then, there had been no analytics for the site.

But the site capped out at roughly 41,000 unique visitors a month, all from 104 blog posts.

The best part of all, it didn’t even take a year to achieve those results.

Keep in mind that back then, you could get rankings much faster than you can now.

So how did it gets rankings and traffic so high in such a competitive space?

It wasn’t the content. It was the backlinks.

Google’s algorithm was much easier to predict back then, and links impacted rankings more than anything else.

Now you are wondering how it got all of these people to link to it. Like today, no one wanted to link to poker sites.

It was from writing posts like this.

By creating list-based posts of the top blogs within the poker industry.

Things to Know:

If you want to do something similar, it’s not as simple as writing a blog that includes the top 30 or even 100 blogs within your industry.
1.Your post needs to be detailed — For example, if you list out the pros and cons of the site and why you included it, that would be much better than just writing a few paragraphs and linking to dozens of sites.
2.You need to include images — when listing out the top 100 blogs within your industry, make sure you include an image for each blog. This one little thing will add a bit of flair to your post.
3.Your list needs to belong — a top 30 list isn’t as effective as writing a top 100 or top 500 list.
4.Your list needs to be of bloggers — don’t list out the top 100 sites. It needs to blog.

Once you publish your list-based post, you’ll need to drive a ton of traffic to it within 7 days of it being published. Back in the day, it drove traffic to the Online Poker Lowdown top 30 poker blogs post by paying for StumbleUpon ads.

Paying Ads to Increase Visitors

You can still drive traffic through Reddit ads, Quora ads, Twitter Ads, and Facebook ads. These options are technically better than StumbleUpon as they have better targeting options.

Even if your blog is popular, it is still recommended that you pay for ads. It ensures your blog post gets read by paying for ads by hopefully a few thousand new people, if not more.

You don’t need the highest quality traffic either. It would help if you had visitors who are somewhat interested in your content.

The more people who read your post, the more they will click through one of the top blogs you mentioned. The more people click through to their site, the more they will notice your blog when analyzing their referral traffic.

In other words, when they see a spike in their Google Analytics account, they’ll notice that the extra traffic came from your blog.

Now, on the 7th day of your blog post being alive, you’ll want to email each website that you included.
The email should go something like this…

Hey John,

I just wanted to congratulate you on having an amazing blog. I loved OnlinePoker.org so much that I included it in my list of the top 100 poker blogs. [insert link to your blog post]

There are so many junk sites in the poker space, but yours truly stands out. I love how you go into great detail about poker strategy, and you have some infographics breaking down how casinos make their money.

I hope you got some nice traffic from me… the blog post was pretty popular and well-received by the poker community.

If you want to showcase your accomplishment, feel free and mention it to your readers. Or you can place this badge on your blog.

[insert embed code for the badge, which should also contain a link back to your site]
Cheers,

(Your Name)

You’re going to have to customize the email and then, of course, make a badge that looks much nicer and is smaller.

See SEO Attempts, Failure, and Learning from It

Things Must Know to Skyrocket you to the Top.

This one strategy really boosted backlink count and skyrocketed you to the top. It still works today, but if you are going to leverage it, there are a few things you should know:

1.Your post needs at least 10,000 visitors — only a portion of your visitors will click through some of the top sites you mentioned. The more people that read your post, the better, so make sure to drive at least 10,000 visitors. If you need to use ads, use them because if only a few thousand people read your post, it won’t work nearly as well.

2.It would be best if you created a badge — make one that is much prettier, simpler, and smaller than the example shown. Without a badge and embed code, you’ll barely generate any links.

3.Send follow-up emails — for all of the people that don’t open up your email and respond, send them a follow-up email within 3 days asking them to share your content on the social web.

The email should look something like the one below.

Hey John,

I’m not sure if you saw the email I sent you a few days ago. I just wanted to congratulate you on having an amazing poker blog. I included OnlinePoker.org as one of the top 100 poker blogs in the world. [insert link to your blog post]

Your blog truly stands out as you have gone above and beyond by creating infographics explaining how Las Vegas casinos work.

I hope you got some nice traffic from me… the blog post was pretty popular and well-received by the poker community.

I know you are busy, but I would love it if you could share the article on your favorite social network.

Let me know if I can do anything for you. Or, if you want me to update the post to showcase anything else that makes Online Poker.org unique, just let me know.

Cheers,
(Your Name)

By combining those two emails with the promotions steps break down in this blog post, you’ll notice that you’ll generate backlinks and social shares.

That’s how to rank on page 1 for one of the most competitive terms. Check the SEO Attempts, Failure, and Learning from It

So why was Online Poker Lowdown a failure?

So why did Online Poker Lowdown fail from an SEO standpoint?

The content seems that they didn’t know what is talking about, even though they hired mediocre writers to write content.

Although it gets the content to rank, the user signals were terrible.

When people landed on the site, many would hit the back button to go back to Google and find a better site.

Just think of it this way: If your site has a terrible bounce rate, this tells Google that people don’t care for your site.

Although you may have “optimized” your site for search engines, it doesn’t really matter because people don’t care for your content, and this tells Google that your site isn’t as good as the competition.

Once the rankings started to drop, they immediately reached out to a few poker players and got their feedback.

They even broke down how it needed to teach scenarios within the content and tell people what they should do when dealing with specific hands, like what to do if you started with a pair of 2s.

The big lesson learned was that knowing SEO isn’t enough. Even if you can build links, write content, and climb to the top of Google fast. You won’t stay if people hate your content (or product/service).

Google cares what people think first and foremost.

So, if you can’t create something, people will love it. Your bounce rate will be high. And you’ll find that it will be hard to get steady organic traffic.

Conclusion

When the Online Poker Lowdown started, the blogger was good at SEO and became too arrogant.

Knowing other solutions could have taken, such as partnering up with someone who knew poker. But you can quickly learn that it won’t work if people aren’t passionate about the topic.

People can tell by your content. You never want to put out stuff that people think is crap. It will just make you look bad.

Plus, when you are passionate about a topic, the writing is different. From the way you’ll tell stories to how you break down actionable steps or how you mix in life experiences.

Doing what it did by popping up sites to make a quick buck isn’t a good thing. Just build something real that you can be proud of. SEO Attempts, Failure, and Learning from It