UPDATE: Tuesday, 28-Feb-2006 12:25 PM

Around lunch time again, when I tend to think about the blog update. Today the focus is on a very important matter regardless of the type of business that you are running online and that is the optimization of your site to take advantage of organic traffic generated by searches.

This discussion is about the content on your site, the key words that describe the site and optimize it. As well as generating external links that show the search engines that your site is also important.

It was thought at one time that the content of a web site did not matter and the ranking had everything to do with key words, meta tags and other technical issues that only someone working on it full time would ever get into.

But, who would be crazy enough to state that the content of a web site did not matter. I think the content of a web site is ALL that matters. It is why someone would take the time to read anything in the first place. It is also the same reason that search engine web crawlers would keep coming by to record the content on a daily basis. If the site is updated daily, then the web "bots" would also visit daily, as the traffic stats of this site show. (See "P31.com USAGE STATS) on the left hand menu.

BUILDING LINKS BACK & CONTENT

Web content is crucial to the success of the site and get web search engine traffic. One look at the stats of this site shows how the search engines are sending more and more traffic on a daily basis. What you don't see is the importance of INBOUND LINKS from other sites, which I have very little of at this point.

The inbound links are very important for the actual ranking --the more inbound links that you have, the higher you'll find your link in many of the search engines. The reasoning is that IF your site is good enough to be mentioned in other sites, then there must be a good reason for it and it must be very important.

Then this issue is almost a 'chicken or egg' dilemma as having good content get your name and site on other places. Once again, this argument shows how important content is.

In my case I have spent a bit of time reaching other blog sites and posting links back to this site.

SEE CONTENT as a LARGE NET:

The more pages this site has, the more targeted that content is and the more linking all of this sets back to the site, here is what happens.

The more pages there are, the more chances that each page has to getting cataloged by the search engines for the content on that page.

The same content allows visitors, bloggers and just about anyone catching an eye on the site to reference it back from their site. At one point I wanted to create a contest or some other incentive to "link back" but I have not come up with a good method yet. I will try to keep thinking of a reason, as this is the most effective ways to get visitors to this or any site for that matter.

NEXT BEST THING to KEY WORD OPTIMIZATION

Keyword optimization used to be the most important step in search engine optimization, but now it matters little in ranking, especially when you are competing for highly sought after keywords.

Still, keyword optimization can really help you get traffic from searches as the traffic from p31.com's stats page shows. While you may never rank number 1 for "some_word" you may still show up tops for a search on "doubling a penny many times" as I have repeated that phrase many times in this site's content. Such non-competitive searches make up a very large proportion of total web searches, and that is greatly benefiting this sites visitor count.

FOUR LEADING KEY WORD OPTIMIZATION STATEGIES:

• Research
• Selection Density Prominence
• Stemming
• Variation

First, Keyword Research and Selection:
You need to identify keywords searched on by your target audience. Use tools such as Yahoo Search Marketing's (formerly Overture) key word selection tool. You can find the tool by searching "key word selection tool overture" in Google and you'll be linked to it.

Make sure to eliminate"negative keywords" that look relevant but are not really searched on by your target market. For instance, "web site copy" is a synonym for "web site content," but most people searching on "web site copy" are looking for software that copies an entire web site to the hard drive for offline browsing.

Impossibly competitive keywords that you have no realistic chance of ranking high for them. How do you know if a keyword is impossibly competitive? One rough measure is to look at the PageRank of the web pages currently ranking in the top three for that keyword. If the PageRank of those pages is much higher than the PageRank of your site will likely have in the future, you will probably never outrank those pages. To learn more about PageRank, just visit the Alexa search engine at alexa.com.

Now on to Key Word Density:

Keyword Density Keywords appear in the content the right number of times for search engines to recognize the page as relevant, but not so often that it looks like keyword stuffing. The longer the content, the more times the keyword should appear.

Keyword Prominence
Keywords appear in just the right positions within your web pages for search engines to recognize them as relevant. The page title, headings, and first lines of the page are often considered the most prominent positions.

Keyword Stemming/Keyword Variation
Using variations of the keyword will help ensure web pages appear relevant to the next generation of more sophisticated search engine algorithms.

In the meantime, variations of popular keywords helps your site appear for the "non-standard" searches on variations of the keyword.

There are three main types of keyword variations:

Word-stem variations. A stem of a word is its base. For instance, "optimize" is the stem of "optimized." Other stem variations of "optimize" include "optimizing", "optimizer", and "optimization". You can also shuffle the component words of multiple-word keywords. Variations of "web site content" would be "web site content", "web content", "content for web sites", and "site content".

Synonyms such as "web page content", "internet content", or "writing for the web" for "web site content".

Lastly, Related Terms such as "internet", "SEO" or "web page" can be categorized into one when you are writing your web site text.

It is interesting to note when you look at the stats of this site that all three of the above conditions have delivered visitors from the search engines. Often my atrocious spelling has led to many visitors. I am a very poor speller and with a quick glance at the searches show that spelling errors have led to many visitors. Of course, they too missed the spelling, but nevertheless they ended up at this site.

The bottom line in all of this is that the content counts! It's everything. That is why the visitor is here. The other topics of this update are what makes the content even better for the visitor and the search engines.

With that I end my update. Carpe Diem, Sam.

BACK to DAY 249 | TODAY is DAY 250 | NEXT is DAY 251

BACK to DAY | TODAY is DAY | NEXT is DAY

GREAT LINKS

• How are the P31 STEPS getting built? See Here...
  
• RICH SAGE Tip-of-the-Day...
  
• Perfect Online Business: Maxsimo.net/company/