To Yakezie Challengers: How I got to 130k Alexa /w PR4 in <5Months | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 11:18 pm – September 28, 2011 by DebtEye

I thought I would share this and use it as encouragement to anyone who is in the Yakezie challenger.

I first started the challenge on 3/30/2011, with an Alexa rating of #7,016,268.  Although my original goal was to be under 200k in 2 months, I wasn't setting realistic goals for myself.  Here's a snap shot of the progress:

3/30/2011 – #7,016,268

04/02/2011 – #3,261,006

04/04/2011- #1,787,030

04/06/2011 – #1,506,469

4/12/2011 – #1,028,573

As you can see, your Alexa rating will drop really quick over a few days once you join the challenge.  Although this can be encouraging and motivate you to keep working on your blog, don't get too comfortable because this won't last for long.  Once you're pass a certain threshold, you will begin to see your rating go down a lot slower.  

So what do you do?  Here's what I did…what worked for me may not work for you.

1)  Keep writing original articles with clever headlines.  Look for "search terms" with high traffic and low competition.  Try to SEO the crap out of the article without overdoing it!  For example, I looked up some keywords that were relative to my blog, and found some with low competition with decent traffic. The keywords I chose were "get rid of debt & why most debt settlement companies fail" .  For both those search terms, I am on the first page.  

2)  Build Links! Build Links Build Links!  This is what I focused on the most!  It's a tiring process, it's annoying, and it's frustrating.  A great tool I use is is SEO Book:  http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/  You can download the toolbar and find "do-follow" links on blogs that are relevant to you.  Try to choose blogs/websites that have a higher PR than yours

3)  Submit your articles to sites such as ezine, pf buzz, and Tipd.  Get the Yakezie community to help you vote your article.  I'm sure they would be happy to vote it! (they definitely helped me out)

4)  Participate in the carnival.  This is a great way to build links.  I literally wrote articles while on vacation so I can get them submitted on time.  That's dedication! 

5)  Build links within your blog to other articles.  Make sure you use a relevant anchor text.

6)  Ask people for Guest Posts!  This is how I got started building links.  I LITERALLY emailed over 100+ bloggers on Wisebread to see if I can submit a guest post.  (this is before I found out about this community)

7)  Make sure all links within your site work.  For the longest time my RSS didn't work.  There's nothing worse than having broken links in your site.

8)  Make sure you have google analytics installed.  If anyone has questions on which key metrics to look at for blogs, feel free to email me: kevin.yu@debteye.com

That's all that I can think of off the top of my head.  Just remember to continue to write great articles, you never know who's reading your blog!

Look for "search terms" with high traffic and low competition.

What do you think is the best way to go about this?

I use Google Adwords and use the keyword tool.  You can look at the global monthly searches and how competitive it is.

Choose a generic keyword, and it will give you a list of relevant keywords that you can look through. 

Glen Craig – Free From Broke said:

Look for "search terms" with high traffic and low competition.

What do you think is the best way to go about this?

Market Samurai. But I think MITR mentioned some free tools on Google.