Through a little research, I was able to find a great search term that has relatively little competition, and I’ve started to rank for its long-tail variants.  The root term is parenting quotes, and the long-tail that I’m ranking for is inspirational parenting quotes.

Why is this such a great term?  Parenting quotes gets 3,600 exact match searches per month and nearly 15,000 broad match searches.  Inspirational parenting quotes get a more modest 210 exact match searches per month, but that’s still 7 per day.  The real key to these terms isn’t their volume though — it’s the limited competition to rank for them.  Note that for all stats below, I’m going to list my ranking — it may be different for you if you do a search, since we’re likely hitting different data centers.  They should be close though.

Details for Inspirational Parenting Quotes:
** All stats are for exact match (ie allintitle:”inspirational parenting quotes” — not allintitle:inspirational parenting quotes) — this shows sites that are most aggressively targeting the term.
Allintitle matches: 209 results (I’m number 1)
Allinurl matches: 20 results (I’m number 1)
Allinanchor matches: 7 results (I’m number 1)

Guess what?  Do an exact match search for the term and… I’m number 1.

Now let’s broad match those same stats and see how we do:
Allintitle matches: 310 results (I’m number 4)
Allinurl matches: 92 results (I’m number 2)
Allinanchor matches: 3,440,000 results (I’m number 4)

Building a few links to this page should secure the top spot for this search term.  The great news is that targeting this term, which is pretty easy to rank for also lets me target the much more difficult (but still surprisingly poorly targeted) term “parenting quotes.”  Let’s look at the data:

Details for Parenting Quotes:
Exact Match Stats:
Allintitle matches: 1,760 results (I’m number 12)
Allinurl matches: 701 results (I’m number 5)
Allinanchor matches: 46,200 results (I’m number 13)

On an exact match search for “parenting quotes,” I’m currently number 13 (number 16 on a broad match).  The allintitle and allinurl numbers for this term are VERY low given its search volume.

Broad Match Stats:
Allintitle matches: 7,740 results (I’m number 15)
Allinurl matches: 4,090 results (I’m number 7)
Allinanchor matches: 2,630,000 results (I’m number 15)

As you can see, I’m approaching competitive rankings for these terms, and I haven’t even started building links toward them.

In my launch of Better Parenting, I’m counting on search to drive visitors.  So I was a little nervous when, a full week after updating DNS to point to the new site, none of my new content was being idexed.  Today, I received a Google alert for my name from betterparenting.com.  Since I’m listed as the author of all posts I write, and my name appears in any comments I leave, this was a quick way to spot when the new site was starting to get indexed.

Right now, I’m tracking my rankings via my own rankings tracking package (I’ll probably make this open to the public within the next week or two).  I’m not in first position (or first page, for that matter) for anything that I’ve targeted yet, but I haven’t started building links to any internal pages, and very few of the site’s pages have even been indexed.

Still, we’re getting somewhere.  One of my site’s author’s, Tiffany, wrote an impressive article highlighting the challenges that some women have getting pregnant after they’ve already given birth to their first child.  It’s a phenomenon called secondary infertility, and the article is ranking on the 5th page of results for the broad search secondary infertility.

That’s not going to drive any traffic yet, but with some additional links and more of the main site indexed, that result should improve.  I’m also ranking for the term make your own baby food with an article about making your own baby food.  That’s on the 6th page of results.

The one real bright spot right now is the exact match term for the domain – better parenting.  The homepage of the site is ranking on the first page (7th position).

As the site develops, the rankings will improve — I’m just glad to know that I’m going to start to see a trickle of search traffic this week.