Bloggeron

Search engine optimization isn't exactly easy at the best of times but if you have a website in one of the ultra competitive niches, then it's almost impossible to achieve top search engine rankings. So should you even bother trying to outrank them in these highly competitive niches?

Well you can try and build a quality website and then build thousands of backlinks to your site in order to try and hit the front page for the most popular keywords, but this could easily take several years before you start to see any results. Even then you still might not be in a strong enough position to outrank any of your competitors.

So if you do insist on going after these popular niches, then you need to take a different approach. For instance you could create your own product within this niche and utilize affiliates to send you traffic and generate sales.

Alternatively you could build a conventional website and try and get other sources of traffic. You don't necessarily need free organic traffic from the search engines to make money online. There are lots of other free ways of getting traffic.

For instance you could write articles and link back to your website or you could build your own network of websites and link them back to your main website, ie the one that makes the most money. If done well this can be just as effective as search engine optimization.

In recent years we have also seen the emergence of social media and networking. This is another way you can drive traffic to your websites. If you create good quality websites with excellent content then it's quite easy to build up a large following on any of the social networking sites.

So the point is that you can go after some of the hugely popular niches but I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you rely on search engine optimization for your traffic. This can take several years of extensive link building and even then you still may not get anywhere near the top of the rankings for the most popular keywords.

You're probably better off using the power of social networking to bring people to your websites, and using free sources of traffic such as articles, blogs, forums and video sites. This will bring you lots of traffic and best of all if will bring instant traffic which I'm sure you will agree is better than waiting months or even years to get free traffic from the search engines.