saadh.com

So, the SEO experiment of my 100 mini video game sites will begin soon. Major problem I’ve been having is that I have cash on me and some money in paypal, but alot is scattered around. Parents want nothing to do with me financially. Two days ago, I finally got my brother to allow me to use his credit card. 500 Canadian Dollar limit though.

So, when some of his money clears up from the CC, I’ll be ordering my first 62 domains. About two of those are not for the 100 mini sites. I’ll be buying the other 40 or so domains soon. I need to find more keywords and niches

Yay! Like many aspiring SEO’ers, I am going to begin my first official SEO Experiment.

What will I be doing? Focusing in on my niche expertise (video games), I am going to see the difference of search engine rankings (particularly google) for small keywords between an established, respected website (Vgescape.com), and many new domain’s, which have the keywords in their domain. Each of these small sites will range from one page to a maximum of seven pages.

Most of the new sites will be set up by August 1st. Most of my major marketing for all of the sites will be done by September 1st.

The experiment should prove very interesting, but it is a big risk. A domain costs approximately 7.00$. All my income comes from Vgescape so I am already on a limited budget.

How many domains will I be buying? Well, there are five consoles I cover, Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, DS, and Wii. Say, by September 1, I purchase an average of 15 domains per console? That is 15 x 5 x 7 = 525$.

Then you have to factor in all the annoying hosting problems I will have to go through with the 75 new sites.

Nonetheless, by October 1, if even 10% of them can rank decently, and take in 1500 uniques a month, with the other 90% averaging 150 uniques a month, this still ends up with a total of about 22,000 uniques a month in total. That would equal out to about 0 a month.

Well, we’ll see. I’ll post up a static page for this experimental project soon.

I’m half way done with my content and webmaster portion of Vgescape, so I began working on marketing Vgescape again as well.

I added the Alexa toolbar to IE and decided that whenever I update my site I’ll keep the toolbar open to raise my rank. The site was already at an impressive 250,000 for its low amount of visitors. Hah, by about 100 more visitors than usual (because of updates) and my own 100-200 pageviews per day:

Traffic Rank for vgescape.com (what’s this)

Today	1 wk. Avg.	3 mos. Avg.	3 mos. Change
38,808	47,944	245,306	77,895

So as I already said, I began marketing Vgescape again. Although many people will say for search engines, site-wide affiliation is wrong, but even the corporations do it nowadays in the video gaming website sphere.

So I went ahead and found all sites ranking in the top 100 for generic gaming keywords and email’ed them off with a proposal for a site-wide exchange. My email was very simple, and nice. I made sure to mention a special quality in each site and names if I could to let the person know I actually know games and their site. I email’ed about 25 people. Already got 10-15 responses back, all saying yes .

My visitors are on an all time low, so I could not mention them. Instead I simply stated I have a google page rank of 6, and even the top tier gaming sites say yes. I haven’t seen a single gaming site with a pr 7. There used to be one, a Zelda site, but that went down to 6 as well.

The problem: I’ve only got about half the responses back. What if I get 20/25 affiliates in the next week? That is 20 new affiliates with 200 pages of my link! Thats thousands of new links in the span of a week.

Paranoid SEO’ers like myself are always scared Google penalizes for this. For this reason, I’ll hold off on my other marketing methods:

-Submitting Vgescape into 300 or so directories
-Commenting and backlinking my site in 100 gaming blogs
-Joining 50 new gaming forums and putting my site in the signature and trying to make an introduction post.
-Trying to get a link from Wikipedia.org (Valuable!)

At first I wasn’t going to do this because I can never follow up on what I plan, but I thought it would be a better idea to write out what I want to accomplish each day so I stay focused:

• Read up on 301 redirecting
• Change address of all /nintendo-revolution pages of vgescape to /nintendo-wii
• 301 Redirect all the old revolution pages to wii pages.
• Pray my search engine rankings for wii don’t go down the drain.
• Create a 3×3 table and interlink all themed pages of Vgescape for better user navigation (meaning repeat the same process over 50 times)
• Add new news and updates to Vgescape to make it look as if its always been updated!
• Fix up all five consoles specs, faqs, release dates, and controllers pages

Okay, so yesterday’s to-do list didn’t work out so well. Repetitive work takes A LONG time to do, so I didn’t end up finishing as much as I intended to.

So what I want to accomplish today (overlapping from yesterday):

• I’ve created all the 3×3 tables, but now I need to add links toward all the related pages (this will take a LONG time and be VERY boring).
• Add a bunch of updates to all your new pages in the recent news, then add 2-5 new video game news articles to make the site look up to date.
• Add 15 new big splash images to the main console pages of Vgescape.
• Already fixed up specs, faqs. Need to fix up/finish release dates, controllers, prices, and pictures pages for all five consoles.

I am trying to go through my work on a day-by-day basis, but my initial plans for July are few:

- Spend a ton of time on Vgescape to make it my flagship site for the next year. Need Vgescape to finance my other work after summer is over.
- Finish up the numerous amounts of cheap gaming sites and blogs, as well game cheat sites as well. All of the work for those sites combined won’t even equal the work that will be put into Vgescape.
- Try to not go broke while hiring a friend of mine, Manan. He is going to be a sophmore in high school. I’m going to be paying him nearly a week to help out with all the sites that I’ll be spitting out. Also will soon be paying someone else a month for writing work. Only problem? I don’t make enough to pay that much.

If I can accomplish those goals above, then my plans for August and Septemeber are going to be quite ambitious, but completely possible.

Wow. Weird how your attitude of life changes so easily, from simple occurrences. Although school let out on the 21st, it seems as if my own summer will really be starting on a more special day, July 4th, America’s independence day (I proudly live there). At this point, it’s clear to me that I’ve spent too much “talking the talk, but not walking the walk”. This past weekend, a few minor events coming together have provided the best time to begin considering my ‘web entrepreneurial’ work to go into full-time swing.

What happened? To start things off light, my cousins just went back home after sleeping over for quite a few days. That meant a whole week of total slobby-ness and unproductive-ness. On a more serious note, one of my (recent) best friends is moving away before our final high school senior year :/. On Friday, final grades came in. After a difficult school year, final grades were good. I spent the actual weekend attending a conference for young Muslims (although I’m not religious at all), giving me good motivation. Also, I’ve accepted parental and home life problems. And finally, I think I’m over something that has been causing me problems for a while.

One of the most important lessons I learned at the conference was to not waste my time planning weeks or months ahead, but instead focus in a day-by-day consistency. I always sit around dreaming and talking about the success of my web businesses in a year from now, but never look even two days ahead. Then, two days later…no work is done.

I also was reminded of how many youths these days have become very spoiled and are not using their time wisely. This linked directly to me as I’ve been quite pampered through my life, and only recently have I had to start thinking about my future and independence — hence why this site is here.

Starting with this entry, I hope to gain a sense of independence, responsibility, and confidence with my web adventures and begin (financially) supporting myself as my college years approach as well.

I plan to write out many of my organizational thoughts and go through my plans for my work as well.

At this point, this blog isn’t really visited, so this to-do list is for myself

Just got http://www.apchemsurvivalguide.com site up for one of the final projects in WWPHSS’s AP Chemistry course.