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

On May 11, 4:20 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
> 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. :-)

Well, it could be -- or that's the claim, anyway.  The few sites I
know that are making money seem to be sites about making money!  Like
johnchow.com, etc.  But that's not what I'm looking to do, so I
wonder....

> Not SEO as such, just common sense. Search engines are not an
advertising
> medium.

Eh???  My impression is that search engines make their money from
advertisers!!

> 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.)

Ah, well, yes, true...but google gets its AdWords money by matching
advertisers with relevant websites, and that depends on know how to
measure "relevancy"...which turns to thoughts of SEO for those who
want to be "most" relevant in terms of SERPs and PRs....

> 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.

Sure, the concept is simple, but obviously ranking will always exist
-- so the question is, why, exactly?  It's more than just keywords in
the <meta> tag....

> 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.

Indeed.  So it appears that backlinks carry the most weight with
google.  Google's relying on backlinks to measure content quality, and
using keywords for after-the-fact confirmation...?

> 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:

"Really quite easy"???  Let's not forget what "being found" means to
me: Top 5 listing, ideally, if not Top Ten or even first SERP...I'm
not talking about simply being indexed somewhere on SERP 94,006,331
now...even SERP 2 would be far from ideal....

And what do you mean by my "real goal"?  Do you mean my ultimate
objective of making money?  It seems that there's no way I even have a
shot at doing so without people finding my site first -- and finding
it means Top 5, 10, 20, or even 30 ranking, since almost nobody spends
much time sifting through different results....

> 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.

Oh, true, it's not their job -- but SEO is about making it their job,
isn't it; or, perhaps better put, "piggy-backing" on what *is* their
job (highly relevant results) to help yourself -- a symbiotic
relation****p....

> 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.

Yes, but not practical for a "lifestyle resource" such as I plan to
create...the site needs to pay for itself first before I can take on
any more financial commitments!  And really, it seems silly to pay for
AdWords when what I have is a niche content site and not some hard-
goods store.  Yes, my revenue model, consisting solely of mainly
Adsense and affiliate programs like Amazon Associates in the
beginning, suggests that paying for advertising wouldn't be
productive.  I plan on promoting my site through forum participation,
in a short and unobtrusive .sig line, but in terms of SEO I wonder if
there's anything I could do...which, it seems, I really can't...which,
in a way, does make sense...but I have to ask!  =)

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