One of the biggest (and best, in my opinion) ways to make money online is to rank for simple, long tail keywords using basic SEO skills and use that traffic to generate money either through Adsense, product sales or affiliate marketing.

First off, let me state that I’m no SEO legend – unfortunately if you’re looking to rank for terms like “credit cards” or “weight loss” which get millions of search hits per month, I can’t really help you there. However, if you’re looking to rank for longer tail keywords which see anywhere between ten visitors a day to a few thousand visitors a month… this report should help.

The problem with ranking for a term is that there are other people that you have to outrank, either because they’ve specifically decided to rank for that term or have done so without knowing.

Those guys are preventing you from making money, and the nicest thing to do is (politely) annihilate them.

No, you won’t be using blackhat techniques or illegal methods to cause harm to them, just using your own awesomeness and new knowledge to outrank them… and steal their traffic.

This was originally part of a paid product I wrote to build a list with a partner titled Google Hijack… it’s edited slightly and republished here so you guys can take advantage of the information.

This is the exact strategy I use for part of my own niche marketing business, and it works pretty well.

Please note that this is my SEO advice which I have learned from a couple years of trying to develop niche websites (and eventually doing this successfully). You may not agree with parts of it – SEO is not an exact science – although the way I’ve detailed works for me and those that have put this into action. Just a little disclaimer.

Your first step is finding a keyword. I’m assuming you already have one – I’m not going to go into keyword research or anything in this post, although I will do a post about this soon if you guys like this type of content.

You’ll need a couple tools to begin (free)…

1) SEO Quake – http://www.seoquake.com

SEO Quake adds a toolbar to search results when you Google your keyword. Below is a screenshot example:

Here’s what the important terms mean…

PR: the pagerank of the domain. Pagerank in itself is a worthless number, but here it helps because it tells you the authority of the links linking to the website you’re trying to outrank.

L: Number of links to the exact page which has ranked for the term. So Wikipedia has 5,190 links to its Internet Marketing page.

LD: Number of links to the website. In this case, Wikipedia.org has over 104 million links pointed at it

Age: The older the website, the harder it will be to outrank as Google likes age. Luckily for you, most long tail websites will have been created within the last 3 years so they’re easy enough.

Now basically, Google looks at two things:

1) On page SEO (how your website is optimized for the keyword)

If you grab the exact domain keyword for a term (for example, internetmarketing.com (or .ORG or .NET) you have a much better chance of ranking for it than someone without.

If you install basic Wordpress on the keyword domain, with the All in One SEO Pack plugin (and input your keywords) and the Google XML Sitemap plugin, you will outrank 95% (and sometimes 100%) of your competitors just doing this, depending on their strength.

2) Off page SEO (in bound links and their quality)

Google rates links to your website by three things:

Number of links x quality of links x anchor text

So for example, ten backlinks with the anchor text “internet marketing” from Wikipedia, InternetMarketing.com etc would be a lot more valuable than 1,000 backlinks with no anchor text from unrelated websites.

Your basic hijack strategy is to look at the pages competing for a search term, better their on page SEO and better their off page SEO. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Your second tool you’ll need for the hijack strategy…

2) BacklinkWatch.com – http://www.backlinkwatch.com

This tool tells you the anchor text used in the backlinks for the domain.

You could replicate exactly the backlinks already pointed to a competitors website, add a couple of your own and bam, you’re outranking him/her easily once those backlinks kick in.

Now here’s what you do to outrank someone for a long tail keyword:

1) Buy a domain with the exact keyword in it. If they aren’t available in .COM / .NET or .ORG, grab keywordx.tld.

So for example, weddingcakesx.com

Or you could add shop / details / info… you get the idea. But you want your main keyword to start the domain and your terms to be all together.

2) Setup Wordpress and get the following plugins:

- All in One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemaps

3) Change your permalinks to /%postname%/

4) Add content to your website.

I’d like to add a special note about content.

You want to have your keyword mentioned around 3-5 times per 400 word article. No more, no less.

You want your content to be boring if you’re using it for Adsense websites (of course, grammar, spelling etc should be alright but don’t engage your visitors as they’re one time and all you want them to do is click your ads) and interesting if you’re using it for affiliate websites (so that they believe your content has value and will click through to the product you’re offering, or sign up to your list)

That’s it!

Some rules…

If the competitors for your keyword have less than 50-100 links pointing at the page and less than 300 links pointing at the main site, they’re insanely easy to outrank. (They’d be PR2-PR3 or less, anything more than that is still possible but will be a bit harder as generally that means quality of links is higher)

If your competitors are less than 2 years old, they’re easy enough to outrank. If they’re greater than 2 years old, they can still be outranked depending on the number links to the page.

If your competitors don’t have the exact keyword listed at least in the title and in the meta description (the text below a link for a Google search result) they’re easy enough to out rank unless they have thousands of links.

Now of course there are some exceptions…

If your competitor has a high PR, but is not optimizing for the term, they may rank simply because the authority of their website is strong. They’re easy to outrank if you optimize yours better than theirs.

If the competitor has very few links, but a high PR this may mean that they cannot be outranked (look at other examples on the page to see what the general strength of those ranking on the first page is).

Why? Because as mentioned above, 10 links from Wikipedia.org with the proper anchor text (you can use BacklinkWatch to check where links are from and their anchor text) is more powerful than 1,000 links with rubbish anchor text. And if a competitor has a high PR, it generally means links are from authority websites.

Your first step after this is to go look at different keywords and get a feel of the domains ranking for this. Once you examine competition for a bit, and try ranking yourself, you’ll get a better idea of exactly what it takes and whether or not you can outrank a term.

Now one of the ways I love to get websites that I can outrank is by surveying Flippa.com or DigitalPoint.com websites for sale section and looking for websites already on sale and making money.

Generally they want 7-10x revenue (so for example, a website making $10 a month the seller would want $100).

I can take 25-50% of what they want, invest it in a website and have it outranking theirs pretty soon.

That way I save 50% of the asking price, build my websites from the ground up and set up easy income streams that last ages if not forever. I can then sell these for 100% (or even more, if I optimize it and rank for other terms or increase it’s ranking to the top three so it makes more money).

Your goal is to build more backlinks than they do, either on the same pages or on pages that are ’stronger’ than theirs. So if they have 15 backlinks of which 10 have the anchor text required, you build 20 with 15 having anchor text.

It’s as simple as that.

Building 20 backlinks (which would take a day or less than $10 if outsourced) will take  you above the website you’re targeting. And you could keep building more with that anchor text – having 50 backlinks with the anchor text would see you outrank some of the results above it and increase your ranking.

Find a keyword, optimize your website for it and destroy your competition. Sounds easy, right? You’ll find out how easy it is when you do it! There’s no point in having the information if you don’t use it.

The “hijack strategy” works for pretty much any non-authority website (it will work for an authority one too, but will take more time obviously as they have age on their side).

The basic concept (in case you skimmed the above post) is you find a website that looks hijack worthy, optimize your page to match it and then build more/stronger backlinks than it currently has. Once your website is making money, you either keep building backlinks until you rank #1 (or focus on other keywords as well) or create a new website. Rinse, repeat, etc.

Feel free to ask questions, otherwise good luck!