Ask HN: How beefed up SEO bogs/websites make money, care to explain?

Oh boy... This is interesting! Never talked to anyone on "this side" before :)

Okay, if you reeeeeaaaaalllly want to learn what's going on. Copy and paste some of the sentences you are writing for people into Google. You will immediately find your articles.

Analyze how those sites are monetizing.

Remember those keywords you centered the article around? Type those keywords into Google. Did you just find that same site? How many Google result pages did you have to click through until you found it. Watch that site in the listings for a few weeks. Is it getting closer and closer to the first page?

If not, dig around until you find one of your articles on a site that is for it's main keyword.

Go to yahoo.com - in the search box type in 'linkdomain:example.com' (no quotes and replace example.com with that domain).

How many backlinks does it have?

Next week, when you search for that keyword again, did the site move up in the rankings? If so, then go back to yahoo and see if the backlink count increased. Did it? It definitly should have if it moved quick enough in the Google search results.

Look at all of the sites that are linking to your articles site. How did that webmaster get those links?

I think I quickly spelled out the complete overview here. The only thing I left out was finding choice keywords to target. That's an art. No ones going to give you anything except general knowledge, otherwise they would be hiring a guy offshore to write articles centered around a keyword ;)

What do you man by this side? Do you also do the same thing? I do think this is a very interesting way of making money (though this will decline sooner or later).

I would definitely try to find out about this art of selecting the keywords.

> Can anybody explain how all this works?

you write a small-ish informational website on a topic, you use SEO to try and get your site higher up on the search results list so more people will visit, and then you attempt to funnel people into ads or referral links for products.

> And on another note, what is the effect of domain name on SEO

top level domain is somewhat better, but other things matter more.

Thanks for the second answer, was really confused on that.

As for the first, isn't it kind of stupid to make a whole website around only one keyword? Or is that what niche blogging all about?

Also what kind of advertisers do these people use. Surely they would not be accepted by adsense because of there strict policy, and they cannot expect to many clicks so they would require a traffic literally in the tens thousands.

It's not that stupid; the more targeted your site is, the easier it is to make it look like the perfect match for a very specific search. That's why it's called a "traffic funnel," since the process takes a broad array of search topics and eventually pushes all of them back to a central site.

Imagine that you're in this to create more than the traffic funnel. You would want to integrate the content for popular searches into a site with additional depth and subsidiary business - e.g. if you sell carpentry products, you might also put up articles about basic home repairs.

If you go 100% of the way, build a brand image around the content, and then sell a product at the end of the line, the funneling process should give you lots of new business. You've established an "instant relationship" with customers through your content, which will put you ahead of most competitors.

People trying to scale this horizontally, like your employer, are only doing the first step in the process and working out deals to secure the others. But I don't think it's a good long-term business. The low-quality content you're pumping out will gradually get eaten away by stronger niche competitors.

This is the first time somebody called my work low quality and I agree fully. Most of what I write, I just don't understand (or understand as much as I would like).

as chipsy said, the more targetted it is, the better. you're designing a page that will show up on the top of some specific search terms.

you target search terms that are as popular as you can get without having major competition for top spots. its all about getting your content to the top, so that people will click through to your site.

many just use adsense. most people don't break the adsense TOC. these sites are smallish, but the sites built by pros usually are filled by original (or at least, originally worded) content. well done sites are done in such a way that the average reader looks at them, gets informed, but still finds something lacking, so they click on your ads or go buy the book you're pushing on the topic, etc.

>Select a high-paying long tail keyword. Which is hot in google search and PPC Advertisers are bidding high for it.

>Get a keyword rich domain name

>Get some articles going on with that density. And put them on that domain making a mini info site.

>Put AdWords on it (earlier Google did approve their accounts and they can keep using it if they play nice.)

>Submit some articles to article directories and get back links.

>Keep getting back links.

>You rank high for that keywords(S) Traffic Rolls in and they click on adverts. You make the money.

Select a high-paying long tail keyword. Which is hot in google search and PPC Advertisers are bidding high for it.

This is one of my biggest curiosities. How do you get all this information?

There are paid keyword research tools and stuff like that. you can even 'buy' top keyword list.

Oh wow, that's another high paying keyword (just look at the ads): http://www.google.co.in/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...