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Welcome to WMW and the INK Forum. Many people are not willing to give that whole answer to ranking here - but, it sounds like you may be woking with competitive keywords??? Yes??? No??? If so you have the directory and GOTO listings on top to contend with. Usually a page that "can" do well in google will do well in INK
INK is mostly about getting your title and description tags correct and matching what's in the body.
-s-
For one, imho Ink does not have near the sophistication that Google does, not by any means. And what Ink is feeding the different partners will end up having a different flavor when it's served up, depending on the recipe ingredients and the way they're cooked up by the individual partner prior to being served.
Ink is not just Ink, it's part of whatever a particular partner's got. For me, not any are worth anything but MSN and AOL, so in my case in addition to eking out some Ink basics over time I've had to pay attention to how to rank for those two, and work out a system for choosing keywords, since with MSN some categories are loaded with directory listings, so there less competitive off-words are needed, which are generally pretty targeted anyway. MSN needs to be watched for those pages and adjustments made. For those phrases with a lot of LS listings at MSN I'll look out of curiousity but concentrate on analyzing the results and competition at AOL. That's it for Ink, except that the basic principle is short and spammy.
The BIG difference from Google is that with Ink it's the "page" while Google, even though what's on the page counts, looks primarily for relevant, worthy web "sites" in total, as well as a site's relationship with others on the net.
So a good part of your ranking well with Google may be that it's a good site altogether, well themed and internally linked in a simple, logical way that's easy to spider. Simply put, a given page may not be spammed up enough for Ink, who quite frankly doesn't look far beyond your credit card and the particular page you've paid for.
In my mind I liken Google to science - much as a staff of medical researchers at a university trying to find ways to bring the best possible cures and solutions for their "patients" - in Google's case, the searchers.
On the other hand, using the analogy, I mentally liken Inktomi to a carnie barker selling snake-oil off the back of truck, where you pay your few bucks for a quick easy fix. It may work as a placebo and fix someone's lumbago, but it sure ain't rocket science.
>isnt much info on this board
No argument there, I'm afraid. I personally had occasion to go hunting myself a few months ago because it was necessary to spend a little less time Googling and seriously take a look elsewhere to get some balance, and at the time Inktomi was an absolute necessity for a particular site. I'd never paid that much attention, but did end up spending some serious all-nighters counting characters in titles and descriptions, checking frequencies and sequences, basic stuff that has to be done every so often anyway, though admittedly it's a lot easier to just have someone tell you. It also saves people dark circles under their eyes and coffee nerves. :)
There is some good information around, though not very much and it's a bit scattered. Hunt through this particular forum and do a site search for AOL and MSN, there were some good threads not too long ago. You really can't look at just Intomi, you have to look at them all you're hoping to rank for.
-s-
