These are pretty long-tail, but they're more competitive than you'd think. And, unlike the bit of competition there is, I'm not actually selling anything or monetizing the results, so my budget is naturally much lower than other sites ... essentially zero.

I've been having a lot of trouble with tripods lately: one got pushed over by a gust of wind; another broke right after I bought it, and so did it's replacement; a different 'pod fell apart just being in the snow too long. And yet in a time when people are spending thousands on digital cameras, and lenses, a tripod is the most important piece of gear you can have. And under-appreciated. So I've written up a comparative review of the last three serious tripods I've used. It's useful information on an overwhelming but important subject. And I'm hoping if I can do well in these semi-obscure phrases, I can bring more organic traffic into my site.

Question is, because I'm going up against people who have a financial interest in a good search rank, all the stupid things people will suggest - directories, forum signatures, whatever - will be even less useful than usual. I like the community here, and having a link in my signature to my photo site makes sense, people who click it tend to enjoy the photos. But I don't think anyone on this site is going to care about tripods, whereas people who find me through Google looking for the model that breaks the minute you touch it, should be happy not to have wasted $100 and, hopefully, bookmark my site and come back. Or better yet, look around. For that to happen, I need a lot more organic links than I tend to in general for a page and search phrase.

So ... is this a page that's likely to get those links from plenty of other web sites I don't know about? The page is http://blog.forrestcroce.com/tripods...ro/2007/08/08/ and the site it's a part of is http://blog.forrestcroce.com/ - this is about three weeks old, probably. What I'm hoping to score for is Quantaray ( 250 K results ), Sunpak ( 2.4 m results ), Manfrotto ( 6.1 m results ), and tripod head ( 2.5 m results ), along with the specific model names, which are much lower competition. All of those links go to Google search results ... there's some PPC, and a lot of commercial sites that hopefully have similar link profiles to each other ... seems like that might be in my advantage.

So except for the specific model numbers, this is pretty ambitious and the short answer is no, or at least that it'll take a while. But most of the smarter folks in here know me well enough to understand what I'm trying to accomplish with my site ... is this worth the time it would take to try to start a word-of-mouth epidemic? I'm going to continue to hype new photos, and do mini-reviews and photography tips on the blog ... but there are only so many hours in the day. And this coming weekend or the next, I'm going to Mt St Helens, won't be bringing a computer with me.

Under normal circumstances, I don't know but I'd lean toward no.

In your particular case, I say but three words: "OH HELL YEAH!"

You've got the photographic experience and knowledge to write a comprehensive, intelligent, unbiased series of reviews.
You're targeting what is a niche market.
And you're targeting something that most SEOs wouldn't have the brains enough to touch.

I've done something similar in the past (and will do so again fairly soon...just waiting on some information from Ticketmaster), and it worked very well.

I think you've got a shot, and a **** good one, to pull off exactly what you want.

Yes and no. I never want to say you can't rank for those phrases and I think the numbers of competitors for the phrases are less than you think. Try an intitle: search instead of the general search. People who are trying to rank for a phrase (at least the ones who know what they're doing) will use the phrase in the page title.

But if you look at the top few results they are some heavyweight sites. I'm seeing Yahoo and epinions and MSN and bizrate. Those are some sites with authority.

I'd still advise going for longer phrases first. "Quantaray 251666004 Camera Lens" still has the word Quantaray inside it and it only returns 98 results for the general search.

So considering your post you probably won't rank for the brand anytime soon, but there's no reason you won't be able to rank for phrases around the brand and as you build more authority into the site you'll start to rank for more and more shorter phrases.

I think my main competition is ritz camera and then Amazon, along with the ones you've listed ... most of them having a financial incentive to stay as close to the top as they can.

Depending on how you look at it, I actually have a decent budget, I'm just not going to put it into advertising. I'm heading down to Mount Saint Helens next weekend, to the few national parks in the area, and the Columbia River Gorge ... then in a few months to Glacier in Montana. All of this means photos on my main site, and on on the blog to announce them, and tell more of the travel story. Hopefully this will all help with the authority in general, and for a lot of geography type phrases.

I figured out how to remove the center column without affecting the way the rest of the tripod attaches, which means I can leave most of a pound behind when I don't need a lateral arm. Most people don't know about that trick, and plenty of others ... which is sad considering how important tripods are in photography, so I'm considering to give out more advice on the subject over a few installments.

Now I probably won't be able to unseat the stores with five-figure SEO budgets for the #1 place, but I'm hoping I can do well on the first page ... is that reasonable?

I'm also going to be targeting more travel or geo phrases, but those will be a lot more difficult. British Columbia, Mt Olympus, Northern Rockies, Mt Hood, the Gorge. Any advice on how to prioritize my efforts? I want to introduce myself to new audiences, and be known for my talent ... which is artistic and technical. This was going to be an article on my main site, but you convinced me talking about how the rss feed will be picked up being an advantage.

Last note: quality of traffic is still important, even if I'm not selling anything. I'm hoping "Quantaray UltraPro Tripod" will be fairly easy to rank for, and if I prevent someone from wasting $100 on something that will fall apart the first time they use it, that's a repeat visitor. I tested two of them, and linked to PhotographReview.com where other people complain about the same problem. But that's a pretty narrow case. I'm starting to give Photoshop advice, too, and will have lots of landscape and travel stuff. I'm not sure whether this is more or less important to promote, or how it might affect visitor loyalty?

With my photo site, I want to see consistently more than 90 % new visitors, but with the blog, I think the rules are different. And that loyal, repeat visitors = word of mouth. The static site, the idea was to get it before as many new sets of eyes as possible ... which is still the goal in a more roundabout way.

PS - Quantaray lenses aren't worth using. Apparently that's more than half true of their tripods, too. But I guess a sane person doesn't snow shoe with a tripod...

I think you have a chance, but what do I know? You're on to something about loyalty and repeat visitors, though. So let me help you brainstorm on that.

Say a person has their heart set on buying the crappy tripod, and reads your blog saying "don't do it!!" Half the people will gladly take your advice, and might book mark you. The other half will say "What does this guy know?" and a week later they'll see you were right. We're probably splitting a group of 100 people in half. Even of the ones who read your article and say "Wow, good thing I found this, I would have lost the receipt and been in trouble" does that really build respect and loyalty? Or is that a common favor, that doesn't warrant anything in return? I have no idea, you know your market better than I do, but they're questions worth answering.

Your travel stuff, on the other hand, is a lot more likely to gain you loyal repeat viewers. And more than half of 100 of them. Think anyone who wants to go camping somewhere for labor day or check out a popular hike. The more info you put in there the better, but this is the kind of traffic where your main asset (the photos you have that are so unique). Someone finds you for Yosemite, likes your pictures, realizes you've been to parts they didn't know exist, and that gains you a lot more authority in their eyes than some tripod no one has ever heard of.

I'm assuming those are rare keywords, anyway. That's kind of a big part of my analysis, so if I'm wrong, you might throw out half of what I said.

So, just to follow up, two weeks after the blog post, I'm seeing a little bit of traffic on some more queries that indicate quality traffic. Some of them don't make sense, and I the one where the guy wants info about nude photography but doesn't want porn or Amazon cracked me up. Normally you wouldn't see those concepts together in the same sentence ... this was a very determined searcher. Some of these give me ideas for future posts ... I should write a follow-up specifically about quick releases.

But there's a lot of good long-tail stuff in here. Almost no traffic under any search, really, and #2 is the title of my blog, so that one doesn't count, but otherwise the low traffic comes with the territory being new and not that frequently updated. All of the geographic and tripod related searches are a wee bit competitive, and exactly what I'm looking for.

I have a feeling I would increase the traffic tenfold in a month by posting at least twice a week. I need to make a priority out of that, without pulling down the quality of each post.

So I wanted to say thanks for the advice and encouragement, but I also wanted to follow up, give the people that answered my question an update on how things are going so far.

I guess that one guy was getting frustrated with all the porn and amazon books he was finding. It's always interesting to see how people found you though, isn't it.

One of the advantages of having a blog is the new content. Just about every web page with unique content will rank well for something and usually it will rank well for several phrases around a core phrase.

Looking at your stats I see a few phrases around the theme fine art photography. What you could do is write a post that's more focused on fine art photography and link it to the post that's ranking or add a link in the older post to the new one.

Even better add a category for fine art photography to your blog. Each post will link back to the main category page by the tag that appears in each post. When you write a new post link to other posts in the category using anchor text around the them. The whole category of posts starts to reinforce each other and you should start ranking for more long term phrases.

Then someone searches for 'fine art photography prices in seattle' and finds your post about the average prices of fine art photography in seattle. They like the post and link to it letting it rank a little better for the phrase and perhaps a few other long tail phrases.

It's a slow moving strategy until it reaches a certain tipping point and you should still be working on bringing in links in other ways, but more posts around a general theme will lead to more search traffic.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Under normal circumstances, I don't know but I'd lean toward no.

In your particular case, I say but three words: "OH HELL YEAH!"

I wanted to follow up on this, since I owe everybody thanks for their advice. And in case anyone else is starting a new site, wondering how to go about it ... since this is a subdomain, technically a brand newish* site in Google's eyes.

I'm getting a lot of long-tail search traffic around the keywords I went after. Most of it is either after a specific model, and I've been hard enough on my gear to go through several, so luckily I've reviewed three different models under four brand names. A lot is a brand name and then bubble level, quick release, locks, or any number of things.

While any of the search phrases only sends a dozen referrals, sometimes even less, there are enough of them to need some type of filter in awstats. And a lot of it is for words that are just plain body text.

* New = July 18, 2007; but only nine posts to date. I'm about to fix that and go into double digits...!

Thanks for the update, and congratulations on the achievement. I'm sure it took a lot of hard work, and it does show that talent and hard work gets a person where everyone wants to be.