A few days before Christmas I started a brand new niche site which is related to jobs in the city in which I live.  I have some affiliate programs running on the website, it has a blog attached with only a few posts and has a keyword rich domain name.  It’s very much targeted to my city, so I’m not at all worried about trying to rank for any terms that don’t have the city name attached.  That narrows the odds down somewhat, but because I live in a city with almost 500,000 people, there is some competition. Like many other cities of this size, we are having some issues with unemployment, so there are 40,000 searches per month for the terms that I want to rank for and competition in the Google Adwords Tools suggests “medium” competition.

The largest competition comes from a site that seems to have been heavily SEO’d  I use the SEO Book Toolbar to help find a competitors backlinks and from what I can tell, the backlinks and techniques that they are using are from a professional.  Despite that, I still believe that not only can I provide a great resource for the people in our city, but I can rank well and make some money from this site over time.

My Strategy

Currently I’m sitting way back on page 8 in Google, but it’s only been 2 weeks, so I’m not too worried.  My strategy is simple; keep adding content, keep building solid backlinks (not spammy backlinks) and make sure I’m giving website visitors a reason to visit.  As part of the promotion, I am using Social Media like Twitter and Facebook, promoting it in my area.  I’m not interested in getting thousands of Twitter followers from all over the world, but rather focusing on taking part in what’s going on in the community on Twitter.  I’m not interested in doing shady Black Hat SEO techniques as I would like to build a solid long-term ranking that will live through the ups and downs of Google updates.

I will try to update you on the progress over the next few weeks and months if I’m able to get the site on to page 1 or 2.