Forum Moderators: phranque
After six months of working on these sites I have made a few observations:
1. Optimization is a waste of time. Site “A” is doing as well as Site “B” which is doing as well as Site “C”.
2. Search Engines have no rhyme or reason. Site “A” does well in Yahoo. Site “B” does well in Google and Site “C” does well in MSN. The primary Search Engine for each site sends about twice as much traffic as the other two combined.
3. Site “A” is in DMOZ and received hundreds of links from all kinds of sites. These links are useless. I get no traffic from them and they have had zero affect on the sites Google ranking.
4. Link requests take more time than I have available. I find that adding content has a greater benefit.
5. Submitting articles to the submission services can work but be careful when adding keywords. I have knocked my sites off the front page more than once with my own article after they were picked up by more established sites.
6. For Adsense and YPN, follow Google’s heat map. Ads at the top and center work best for all three of my sites. I have tried other arrangements with no benefit. I don’t always like this and it is especially ugly on site “B” but I can’t argue with success.
7. Traffic is the most important key to success. Forget the “high paying” keyword website. I have received clicks worth $2.00 down to $.02. But my average value for each click has remained fairly constant.
I know these observations may be counter to others experiences but I thought I would put them out there. It may save new webmasters some time.
How wrong am I?
If optimization doesn't work, you are missing something (and the question would be, what are you referring to when you say "optimization?").
If you see no rhyme or reason, you have more research to do.
It sounds like you're not doing any blackhat stuff, so by optimization you must mean the regular stuff (26 steps) - perhaps 6 months isn't a long enough test. The ODP listing for "A" could stand you in good stead as time passes, helping to establish you as an "authority" site. You don't mention if in you're in the Y directory - if not, that's also quite valuable.
4. Link requests take more time than I have available. I find that adding content has a greater benefit.
Imho, you're bang-on with that. Content is still king. If you regularly add lots of pertinent content, on a variety of variations on your main theme (all on their own specific pages, with proper titles and careful internal linking), the SE's love you, and people link to you without you asking them to - meaning non-recip incoming links.
Certain topics are unexpectedly popular, and it may just be that you have found a niche that other webmasters have not thought to exploit properly yet.
The changes in traffic over time can also be for reasons unrelated to optimisation and search engine exposure. If Jay Leno talks about red widgets one day, suddenly everyone is looking it up. Well there are thousands of chat show hosts, DJs, bloggers and columnists who influence the popularity of a subject. So a spike in traffic may just mean that the topic as a whole has become more newsworthy.
Optimization is a waste of time.
It goes against my nature, as I am an advocate of optimization, but we are finding the same! Having spent months doing the recommended optimizations on pages, we are not best pleased that it has made no impact on readership or apparent search engine positioning.
The WWW is a fickle environment <g>
Matt
Site “A” does well in Yahoo. Site “B” does well in Google and Site “C” does well in MSN. The primary Search Engine for each site sends about twice as much traffic as the other two combined.
Sounds to me like the sites are pretty much optimized, albeit each one, by happenstance or not, for a different SE. And it looks as if you might have a goldmine of information here that can be exploited to find why the differences in performance among the engines.
There must be just a swarm of readers of this post who are foaming at the mouth to know exactly which these sites are because you have accidently built a lab.
My guess would be that site B is a blog.
Exactly. The conclusion shouldn't be "optimization doesn't work." It should be "not everything that is often thought to be optimization works, and not everything that is often thought to be optimization is appropriate for every site and for every situation." Something's working if three sites are doing well in various search engines; the trick is to figure out what's working, what's hurting, and what's a waste of time.
"...spent a lot of time working on key words, putting in descriptive meta tags..." implies that in at least one case effort was put into things that many will call 'optimization' but that often isn't really what works. It would be expected to be most effective for a search engine that relies primarily on on-page factors.
"...had to build content fast... wanted to build a solid and professional looking site..." suggest an approach was taken that many would recommend is exactly the way to go.
foaming at the mouth
Yeah, I did restrain myself and did not ask for a sticky of the urls. But would be a fascinating case study of basic SEO methodologies. Get out the old SEO toolbox and go to work for a day or two...
