Accurate, usable search results are in everyone's best interest.

We know what the search engines are trying to do. Their motive, returning results that reflect the truth, is good. We help the search engines recognize a website's offerings.

The job of the SEO is to understand how the search is carried out, and to use this knowledge to create website infrastructures that promote particular keyword associations that will register with the indexing spiders. While we can see good results from implementing certain optimization techniques, there is no manual for this craft. Experience is everything.

I have been practicing this unusual craft since 1996. Google did not exist.

But search technology did, and understanding searches was obviously important. I experimented with every possible technique I read about or developed on my own in my attempts to influence the search result. I learned first hand that multiple, linking sites with the same exact content get penalized. I observed at first the advantage and then the disadvantage of hidden text (text, packed with the keywords, displayed the same color as the background). I gained extremely valuable information from my experiments with keyword density, keyword position on the webpage, and the impact of symbols in the search phrase. I learned through serendipity that using all lowercase letters can be disadvantageous in some situations. I discovered, through experimentation that I could achieve high ranking though the use of keyword specialized pages. I called them satellite pages because they only existed to send visitor to the homepage. I eventually learned that it is even better to make the specialized page a real content page, with legitimate links to more relevant content. And that static is better than dynamic...

There was a time when meta tags were a big deal. These are tags you put in the head of the html that get read by the indexing agents, the robots and spiders. It was easy to get noticed back then, because the search engines read the data that I placed, and had complete control of, in the meta tags. For obvious reasons, this looseness is a vulnerability, but some engines still rely on them, so I encourage you to post optimized meta data. The keyword meta tag is less important now that the robots read your content, but there are tags the affect and guide the spiders - there's even a Googlebot comand that you should pay attention to.

By the time Google became the leader of search, content was already the primary focus for relevancy. The fastest technique for rank improvement was content creation. My experiments with targeted content prove that lots of relevant content with the right keyword densities improve rank dramatically.

I had been SEOing the children's audio site, growler.com for the keywords if this industry: childrens audio, children's audio, kids audio, kid's audio, etc. This site is seen as a resource, so there are many one way incoming links, something that is very good for rank. Over a period of several months, by creating targeted content linked to the homepage, I brought each of the keyword sets into the first or second search results page.

In February 2005, I began optimization on four new pages of content centered on 4 keyword sets, "childrens audiobooks," "children's audiobooks," "kids audiobooks" and "kid's audiobooks." By late March, "kids audiobooks" and "kid's audiobooks" were both #1 for that search in Google, and the other two were on the first or second page.

My most recent, significant research involves a resource site I designed from inception. I wanted to create a link magnet in the form of a children's music resource. I used research to find not just the keyword sets but also the domain name. SEO is more effective when not only content, but also domain name carry the keyword brand. Research revealed that the top trafficked keyword sets for children's music are "kids music," "kids songs," "childrens music," and "childrens songs." I purchased the domains: kids-music.org, kids-songs.org, childrens-music.org, and childrens-songs.com, originally because I wanted to create a network of related sites, but the sheer work involved made me cut the project back. I focused on childrens-music.org because it was the most broad descriptive, the most inclusive, and the best name for a resource titled The Childrens Music Portal.

Notice that the name isn't The Children's Music Portal, which would be grammatically correct. I find it fascinating that because more people omit than use the apostrophe in their searches, the grammatically incorrect version is more valuable from a keyword perspective. By using Childrens instead of Children's we will see more traffic. Also because domain names can't use apostrophes, there is an even stronger argument to omit it from the name.

Content creation on this site was handled in a unique way as well...

...more is coming...


Bob Sakayama, SEO

Is your site penalized? If you believe a Google penalty has been imposed on your site, click here. Read the article on this page to learn more about the research used to study the causes of getting penalized in Google.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)