Re: My Very Strange Webhost, SBI! -- Opinions, Please

Prisoner at War <prisoner_at_war@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:

> How is/are your site(s) doing in terms of traffic and keyword SERP?

I don't know, and actually don't much care. The thing is, my site isn't
intended to generate revenue from traffic, and hosting at sourceforge
is free for open-source projects.

Don't get me wrong - if ad-click revenue were paying my rent, I'd care
quite a lot about traffic. :-)

> Unless you really believe in a kind of "built it and they will come"
> web-mysticism, it seems that SEO has to be a part of business
> strategy...

Not SEO as such, just common sense. Search engines are not an advertising
medium. Their business model is based, in part, on a credible reputation
as an impartial resource. They can and do sell "premium listings," but
those are clearly marked as such. They work very hard to discourage any
kind of attempt by sites to bias their own standings. (By "bias," I mean
to try to affect the standings in a way that the ordinarily-indexible text
wouldn't warrant.)

None of this is especially mysterious - keywords found in HTML headings
rank higher than those found in body text, for instance. So do those found
in link text, on sites that link to yours - the idea being that link text
is often descriptive in nature.

Google tries to rank highly the sites that are considered authoritative
or are otherwise well-thought-of by their peers. In short, sites with more
links leading to them from other sites that also match a keyword, will
rank
higher. That's why Wikipedia turns up at the top of damn near everything
from Google lately - everybody + uncle is linking to it.

Ensuring that you can be found with any relevant search is really quite
easy, and nothing to do with what sounds like your real goal:

> But they've got to know it exists in the first place!

Hate to say it, but - spend some money. What you need is just plain old
advertising, not search engine tweaks. The job of the search engines is
simply to ensure that someone who knows your brand (a unique keyword)
can easily find information about it (your site). Getting the word out
about your brand isn't a search engine's job.

I would advise talking to the other end of Google, and buying some
Adwords.
That's where you'll want to use broad terms - Adwords uses the same key-
word database, and they'll put your ads on sites that match the keywords
you supply, so more generic terms will reach more people.

sherm--

-- 
My blog: http://shermspace.blogspot.com
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net