Update: Welcome Sphinn, StumbleUpon users :). How can you rank for competitive keywords like “Mortgage Calculator”? I don’t know about SEOBook, since he’s always talking about it, but here’s how Google would rank for a bigshot mortgage term like that.
1. Buy a ‘make your free website’ WYSIWIG-and-template based website, a la Geocities. Augment with a whackload of cheap hosting across different C blocks and IP ranges. For domains you can use subdomains or include them free (compare that to the cost of buying a link…).
2. Have a bunch of graphic templates made focused on the real estate sector. Pictures of houses, happy families and dogs, simple layouts, obvious email address/phone number etc.
3. Hire students to cold-call real estate agents and offer them free websites, and some resources on where to promote them (i.e. a basic how to do linkbuilding guide and quality directory list). If they ask what the catch is, be honest and tell them that there are links to your mortgage calculator webpage from their own sites.
Presto, you have:
- Themortgage.com
- TDCanadaTrust.com
- RBCRoyalBank.com
[My SERPs look like this:]
| Web | Results 1 – 10 of about 18,200,000 for mortgage calculator. (0.08 seconds) |
Sponsored Links |
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| Free Mortgage Calculators Easy to Use Mortgage Calculators. Check Payments and Mortgage Rates. InternetMortgageCalculators.com |
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Mortgage Calculator
Mortgage Calculator — How Much Can You Afford? | CMHC
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This easy-to-use mortgage calculator will help you estimate the maximum house price and mortgage you can afford, as well as your monthly mortgage payments.
www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/buho/buho_005.cfm – 27k – Cached–Similar pages
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RBC Royal Bank – Mortgage Payment Calculator
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Calculate your mortgage payments and see how you can save thousands of dollars in interest costs – while paying down your mortgage sooner! …
https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/cgi-bin/mortgage/mortcalc.pl – 26k – Cached–Similar pages
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TD Canada Trust – Products and Services – Mortgages 
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The calculator is for demonstration purposes only and is not part of the application process Mortgage rates are subject to change at any time without …
www.tdcanadatrust.com/mortgages/afford.html – 11k – Cached–Similar pages
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Mortgage Calculators
www.themortgage.com/calc.htm – 4k – Cached–Similar pages
In fairness, the last two also carry a pretty big brand imprint which gets lots of free, juicy editorial links. But who the hell has ever head of ‘themortgage.com’ (unless you’re in the market, obviously).
What’s especially sweet about this is that it’s endorsed by Google. Ever seen those ‘Powered by Blogger” badges? On blogspot subdomains… Templated … And links to a mortgage calculator site from a real estate broker – that’s standard in the industry anyways, so it’s not like offtopic links from something else.
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