inter:digital strategies

Keyword stuffing. Pick half a dozen key terms and litter them liberally around your website. What does this do for you? Mostly, it restricts the vocabulary of those who find your site.

Using high density keyword strategies and related strategies which optimize a website for just a few terms are kind of like assuming your audience has a 500 word vocabulary. Not really a wise assumption, given that the average native English speaker suppsedly uses between 1200 and 2000 words in everyday speech — and that this number is estimated to be 10 percent of their known vocabulary.

These statistics on vocabulary are an interesting question of their own, as an aside. It’s well worthwhile to question the veracity of that statistic. I suggest reading How many words? by Michael Quinion to get a sense for the true complexity of the question.

Regardless, by focusing your research on a narrower body of keywords all you’re doing is restricting the usable search vocabulary for visitors to your site. Is this an effective way to build traffic? Absolutely not. Even the long tail of keyword research is restrictive: but, rather than favoring a very small vocabulary it opens the doors to cover your topic as thoroughly as you can imagine.

Open your mind to all of the possibilities: consider that people’s vocabulary choices are based on their life experiences, not yours. No short list of keywords can possibly encompass the search terms used by your visitors: even when attempting to apply a list of thousands of terms across your site, you can safely gamble that a significant portion of your visitors may still arrive via terms you have not considered. All you can hope to do is make certain that the broadest scope of descriptive terms for your site are present and available to be indexed and searched.

And, of course, there is a corollary advantage to wide-ranging keyword research: you can expand your own vocabulary in the process!

A new service using data from Alexa, Competitious provides an interface for managing your information resources about the competition. It sounds like a pretty exciting possibility for search marketing: organize your resources and keep a close tab on the services, popularity, traffic rank, and buzz surrounding your fiercest competition.

Although it is, essentially, a fairly simple interface for tracking competitive information which is easily available, the ability to push all that information together is certainly a worthwhile service. From a consultant’s perspective, it’s worthwhile because you can create multiple projects to track: keep your eyes on each client’s area at a glance.

Naturally, my first thought is about adding more features: for example, tracking ranking reports using your selected keyword list and checking against your competitors’ ranking. I know, I know…ranking reports are practically worthless. However, knowing how your own search performance holds up against your competitors’ is still valuable: and this would be a relatively easily automated tracking tool.

It’s interesting: I know perfectly well that Alexa data is practically worthless by itself. However, between a set of sites all in the same market (say…competitors), the relative performance data may still convey some usable information. It’s not the numbers you need to look at: it’s the relationships.

Today, I received a very exciting letter from the contact form here. I mean, “exciting”. It starts off like this:

Hello,

I visited your website today and noticed that you can benefit from more original content.

I can easily make your web site more successful by adding hundreds of web pages to your site with fresh, original content. It’s an easy formula for success: More web pages with great content attracts lots of visitors that generate profit for your website.

Forget about spending hours upon hours writing content for your website or paying hundreds of dollars for a professional writer.

My service can help.

Well thanks, Article Chief, for that enlightening information. I had no idea that my website was lacking in original content. I mean, here I thought that I’d been writing new and unique content for the last 10 months!

If this was actuall submitted by hand, I would say this is badly mistargeted marketing.

However, it’s equally likely that it was actually submitted automatically: so in reality, it’s untargeted marketing. Spam. As spam goes, it’s pretty legitimate: it’s well written, it’s got a name attached to it, and it’s provided contact information (email.) But, like most spam, it’s also entirely irrelevant to my needs. And, because it’s been so badly mistargeted, the end result is that I’m reading this blog post – providing negative information about Article Chief and their marketing practices which will now be available indefinitely online.

Providing a spam service requires spam marketing, I guess. If you are selling a service which nobody really wants, you just need to market widely in order to have a chance to sell anything. Frankly, you’d be better off coming up with a legitimate business model.

Article Chief offers webmasters 300 pages of content each month for $29 per month. I immediately note that the first and second paragraph specify “original content” – but when it comes to statements explicitly about what the service offers, the word “original” is no longer present. Suspicious, isn’t it? Rather than reselling hundreds articles every month, why not spend your time writing a few pages of truly original writing and sell your services as a professional copywriter? Instead of spending your effort on untargeted marketing efforts, work on building a professional reputation: truly market yourself and your services rather than preying on unsuspecting webmasters.

Thanks, Article Chief: but I’m afraid I won’t be requiring your services.