level80 - 11:38 am on Oct 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

You misunderstood If you have a page about widgets most people optimise it for all widgets. This way you get search referals for green, blue, pink, pointed, heavy, squashed etc widgets. You get MORE traffic. I do the opposite. I optimise only for pointed widgets. No variation. I get less traffic overall. But the traffic I do get is highly targeted for that term. Hence the ads on the page also will be. Result = better click through and better conversion = more cash and happy smartpricing!

This is exactly what I am doing, it's leading to increased, less targetted traffic though (I think partly because optimising individual pages for specific terms means the site is ranking higher now for popular, yet less relevant terms). Traffic goes up, CTR goes up but because the ads are now targetted to very specific keywords/phrases the bid price they need to win is lower. In the long term I want traffic to increase yes, but not ad revenue to go down.

Well google search will tar your whole site with the same quality score. You are not gaining traffic by doing that. You are losing places for your good pages.

Nope, individual pages get their own Pagerank in Google. The good pages have only gained places. Although some pages may temporarily disappear (because I've renamed them), once Google spiders the 301ed page it ranks that page even higher thanks to the optimisation.

Good content, useful content, content that naturally makes you forward a link to your friends, content that makes you bookmark the site, stuff available nowhere else. Someone bought that dusty book though! Yes REAL content.

Good and useful are entirely subjective. What's useful today might not be tomorrow. Personally I don't forward links to friends and don't bookmark sites (that's what a brain is for). As to stuff that's available nowhere else - well even if I write the stuff myself (and yes I have done that) it's not what I'm best at. Hmm, new site - hundred pages of real unique content on a topic I know plenty about that can easily be monetised with Adsense. Should be easy enough to do. In fact I can think of two and it would avoid getting duplicate content penalties.