subject: Basic SEO Wisdom [print this page] This is a story about a poor guy with an inept domain that wanted to build a site geared for a very competitive keyword and his long, agonizing journey toward the true light of SEO wisdom.
Here's a little foundation for what I'm about to cover here. A while back I bought a stupid domain name. It was one of those fairly useless domain names that might have been good for maybe selling cellphones or something. The thing is, though, I'm a poor guy. I don't have time to taylor a site for cellphones with the pitiful amount of money I have. This was my thinking not long ago at least.
After sitting on this domain name forever I decided to put a site up there and give myself to the study of SEO or search engine optimization. It seemed like an interesting subject and I knew to those that managed to learn SEO, marketing, and some web design would fall infinite riches. It really sounded good to me.
So I went for the throat so to speak. More precisely I picked out some search terms that I will probably never be able to get traffic for in my lifetime. Smart I know. This had the grand side effect of having the site sandboxed by Yahoo and Google until pigs flew.
Recently they flew, however, and I've come out of the sandbox altogether and hit face to face with a few SEO surprises. I did manage to get a tiny trickle of traffic but not from the terms I tried to get it from. After trying to optimize those pages for the key terms I received traffic from I got more traffic. This of course started me down a long road of speculation and hair pulling.
After many a night of such I've come up with a few things that I believe will give anyone the power to eventually pull traffic off the net and covert it into a good decent living. I'll probably write an ebook and make millions one of these days.
Don't fall into the trap of focusing totally on building this far flung and far reaching site that will rule the world or make you millions instantly. Unless you have lots of money you're going to need to work for your traffic. Plan your site out carefully and make sure each page is a precision crafted piece of art.
I love serverside scripting and dynamic websites but I've come to realize there is a danger that people will overuse it. I know I have. If your site is dynamically generted, make sure every page isn't a total cookie cutter image of every other page. It's good to have the same navigation and same general layout but each page also needs to be special. Each page should have careful, proven SEO techniques applied to maybe a single key phrase.
