LAST EDITED ON Apr-01-07 AT 10:41 AM (PST)
 
Hey Steve,

Thanks for sharing...

My first site was a content site about Las Vegas, over a decade ago.

My second site was a niche search engine about Las Vegas.

The SE was pretty crude, but I spent time adding hand-picked links for a ton of Vegas related categories...I had the best sites about dining, blackjack, hotels, news, history, etc.

Then, I had to get the SE to list the "relevant" pages. A lot of my SEO education came out of owning my own SE and trying to get the best results. Trying to get your own SERPs to deliver high quality results is the single best lesson in SEO you can have.

Once you understand how your own SE works, it becomes easier for you to understand how Google works.

As far as building niche engines, it is something that still works well today, but it takes quite a bit of work.

But if you pick a topic you are interested in, it can also be a lot of fun, exploring sites and pages related to your topic of interest.

Use SpiderBomb to search for good sites relevant to your theme.
Then, edit and rate the resources in your Spider files, giving them the "hand picked" touch. This takes some time. Learn how to write the descriptions using the proper keywords so your results will "work". And don't forget the Fatty "weighting" system.

Use the Fatty scraper files to fill in results until you've build up enough resources.

And the Linez Tuel can be very helpful when editing Spiderbomb files.

Once you've got about 1000 high quality, hand picked pages, you can create tons of content in a directory style by simply using SSI tags.

For Las Vegas, I'd pick categories like dining, casinos, nite life, shows, gambling, history, then just link to the correspnding pages that used SSI tags to pull my SE content to make "regular" html pages.

If you've rewritten a good percentage of the descriptions, you'll have a unique directory of high quality links and resources.

For the actual SERPs, they didn't have SearchFeed or AdSense for revenue, so that made things tougher.

But there's some other benefits...Be sure to use the "Add a link" (I recommend Taz's AddUrl) to get other webmasters to submit their sites. This builds a list of other webmasters you can JV with, and you know they are all web masters if they have a URL to submit. A great way to JV.

This is actually how I sold my SEO services "way back in the day"...

Next, get yourself a professional done award graphic and pass it out to the webmasters with high quality pages, with a link back to your site...Something like "The Best Las Vegas Pages" award.

Awards can still appeal to webmasters and they are still more likely to post an award than a link. Give them a reason to post a link back to you.

It takes some work but building a niche SE still has some great benefits.