IndexThe effect of competitionThe solution lies in volume and unique contentExampleI have observed how search engine results are evolving recently. The current scenario has evolved to the point where for any topic or keyword, top-ranking websites occupy the top positions in search engine results. So, if you have a low-ranking website or blog, you will have a very difficult time overcoming the strong competition from high-ranking sites. These top-ranked sites may have taken a long time to establish themselves, but it seems unfair especially when they can easily rank for any topic related to your low-ranked site even if you feel you have better wisdom or content to share. This has now become a natural problem for many bloggers. It's even worse for those who target the most current trending topics. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The Effect of Competition I will go into detail on how exactly competition is affecting a low ranking blog. Just a few years ago, it was clear it's easy to write an article about the trending keywords of the day and get some if not a lot of traffic. Six (6) years ago there was almost no competition. Even if it was there, it wasn't organized by Google. The World Wide Web has offered extensive possibilities for targeting a variety of keywords that have not been well exploited by webmasters. Year after year instead of following best practices, many webmasters have tried to game Google's ranking algorithms. Google has also evolved over the years. Since webmasters were busy playing games, this presented an opportunity for authentic webmasters. These are the same webmasters you see today as the ones running top-notch established websites. Anyone who attempted to exploit loopholes in search engine algorithms was swept away from Google's search results rankings. As this happened, many people who had authentic content to share found a great opportunity. All of these have increased content on the web and increased competition. Subsequently the recession played a fundamental role. Competition came from all over. As a result, even a real blogger has less chance of attracting traffic from search engines. It's as if there's an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) mafia out there that takes the whole slice of the pie and leaves you with little or nothing. The problem is twofold. First, you have competition from top-tier sites. If you target any keyword, you will rank lower than established sites if they have already targeted that keyword. Secondly, you have to face competition from low-ranking sites like yours. The web is growing boundlessly. It is because everyone can become a blogger and share their ideas on the same topic as everyone else does too. This translates into tough competition for an emerging blogger. Today it is even more difficult to establish your site among the high-level ones. Now I have better luck, despite sincere efforts. The solution lies in volume and unique content. From my experience I found a solution to this problem. But then it has its trade-offs. If you think something is better than nothing, you can continue reading. The idea is to focus on keywords (or topics) with huge search volume versus those with low volume. So, even if the topic is old, it's best to stick to one with huge search volume. For a low-ranking website to get traffic, the overall search volume for a wordkey should be very high. You can't just filter out long-tail keywords and expect to get traffic from them. Because there is so much competition today, chances are that most of the long-tail keywords you've been thinking about have already been conquered. Since long-tail keywords will have lower search volume than short keywords, you will get less or no traffic. All that little traffic will be absorbed by high-ranking sites. Let me digress here. I've noticed in recent years that many websites have opened just to take advantage of trending keywords. If you don't know what trending keywords are, you can find them at google.com/trends. They are the ones that people search for more today than in previous days or months. If a keyword has seen a sudden increase in traffic for any reason, it is said to be trending. There are also new upcoming keywords that, for example, can be the name of a new movie that picks up volume once the movie comes out in theaters. If it breaks box office records, it will trend for much longer. Most trending keywords stabilize at the previous or new low average volume after a certain period of time. It has also happened in the last couple of years that many websites have sprung up to take advantage of long-tail keywords. I tried it too. That's because most top-ranking websites like Wikipedia or YouTube already appear on the first page for any short keyword like "Greek mythology." A new secondary keyword like "Apollo in Greek mythology" ranks another website first before the Wikipedia entry. Even longer-tailed keywords like "Apollo's sister in Greek mythology" pushed the Wikipedia entry further down. This means you may have a chance to regain your lost ranking by searching for a long-tail keyword that no one has written about yet. But then this phenomenon has already happened and now there are many websites like Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers type sites that already have entries for these. You can hardly stand a chance against these. So, if a low-ranking site needs to get at least some share of traffic, you need to focus on short keywords. Let's go back to the starting point. This definitely has a lot more competition, however, if your content is unique, the huge search volume creates the possibility of little traffic for certain combinations of long-tail keyword searches that will match your content. These long keyword combinations shouldn't be popular enough that no one will appreciate them. I would have thought about it. Therefore, if you write new and unique content yourself, you have a chance that some random searches will match your combination. Don't worry too much about uniqueness. We are all unique individuals. Write yourself. Any two individuals writing alone on even the simplest topic will write content that doesn't exactly match. Plagiarism certainly fails here. So you can see how the natural evolution of Google's search engine algorithm takes care of plagiarism. Now let's move on to the next problem: Now you have decided to focus on short keywords but write unique content so that unique long-tail random combinations are present. But you have the volume problem. How to find high volume keywords? Don't all short tail keywords have high search volume? No. Likewise, you can think of the long-tail keyword of an obscure topic, but it will have zero searches. The possibility of a random and unique long-tail keyword being searched by a random audience mandatorily requires the main topic to be extremely popular. Given thatyou get very little traffic from this, you would like to get that trickle over a long period of time, which means you should look for topics that will be trending long into the future. So how to predict the future? I will draw inspiration from the book Antifragility by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In that book, the author had written a small section on predicting the future through the subtractive mechanism by providing a simple rule of thumb. I believe the same can be applied to online search volume as it does to the wall. The idea is that the future is already in the past. What has survived for a long time can be predicted to survive for the same period of time in the future. This means that upcoming new ideas are expected to be short-lived compared to older ones that we still have in application today. Note the word “expected” here. This is important. Here we are dealing with uncertainties. So we need to understand what expectation means. Expectation means on average. If you take 100 ideas that have survived the last 10 years versus 100 ideas that have survived only the last year, you can say that more of the 100 ideas that have survived the last 10 years will survive for another 10 years than those of the 100 that have survived last 1 year. However, if you just look at next year, you can expect a roughly similar number from both 100 to survive into next year. Sure there will be some keywords, but there will be very few in the second set of 100 that will survive for the next 10 years. After 10 years you will have those very few from the second batch in your first 100 list of that time. If you still don't understand the previous paragraph, spend more time on it. I would also suggest reading that Antifragility book. It's the read of a lifetime. Then proceed with the application in the current context. Example We can easily apply it to predict the keywords of the future. It would be better to illustrate this with a simple example. Let's look at the keywords searched in the context of movies. For me Titanic has always been the most popular film. Well, it got many Oscars and created all-time box office records until Avatar broke them. Both by legendary director James Cameron. In this image taken from Google Trends we show the search volume in the period from 2004 to 2013 (to date), for three films Titanic, Avatar and After Earth. These three are represented by the colors blue, red, yellow respectively. As you can see, Titanic is really popular. It maintained an average search volume at or slightly above the peak seen for this year's release of After Earth. Avatar is much more popular. After its release in 2010, it reached its peak. Its average volume in recent years is close to slightly more than that of the Titanic. Next we will see how their search volume performs compared to recently released films that have become popular and have grossed well at the box office in recent years. I took the films released in 2010 which include Inception, Iron Man 2 and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". See all the jokes in five colors. The colors are in their respective order: Titanic, Avatar, Inception, Iron Man 2 and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". At the beginning of 2010 you didn't know which one would be very popular. But only one in four has stood the test of time. Avatar is still the most searched for compared to the last three films. Even though more than ten years have passed since its release, the Titanic is still sought after. This is the sure way to predict the future. In 2010, I know Titanic has been popular for a decade. But of the films released that year, I can't be sure which will stand the test of time. If I had to choose one movie to write an article about, it would be better to write about Titanic than any other. If I had chosen Avatar,.