Blind Ape Seo

To measure the effects of volume, I am adding volume (and SE readable content) to 3 sites of mine.

Two blogs and 1 content site.

The blogs yould be updated more often and the content site was (is) in a miserable state.

I am setting the monthly Adsense and Visitor averages from 17th of July to 17th of August as absolute zero.

At the end of one month you will see a pretty graph showing the changes. This will be updated one month later as well.

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PS: Someone over at wickedfire complained that “content should be user readable, not SE readable”… well, next time read more carefully. What I wanted to point out was the fallacy of only user readable content (images, flash, navigation, etc..)

Coincidentally, the SE-readable content (text, text, text) turns out to be user-readable as well. What a nice surprise, eh?

Everyone in the industry knows the old adage

“Content is King” .

Well, for this to hold true, let me add a bit to it:

Search engine readable content is king

Sadly, this does not include your images (see my posts on how to change that here and here) or your flash games or your pretty videos.

It DOES however include everything you can do to describe them.
Working on that will bring you good and stable Search Engine traffic and is always on my list for SEO techniques.

Why would this be valuable?

For this article, I will present 1 example for a type of site that can make use of that.

Flash Game Arcades

Seriously almost NONE of them provide a written, clearly readable description of their games.

If this is you, here is a small calculation.
Say you have 200 hand-picked games (small, I know) and you provide only the title at about roughly 3 words per game.
Leaving all the navigational gibberisch aside, that leaves 3 words per game that a search engine can find and rate.
Not even necessary to mention that those 3 words won’t help a lot, cause they are ALL over the net, on every site that has that game. (600 for your WHOLE site)
If you just write a 50 word description for the game, you will have (50+3*200) 10600 words.
Now, most of those will probably not be relevant, but the visibility of your content will be much, much improved.

A lot of work? Yes.
Worth it? You bet.

Aside from the increased SE visibility, you will also differentiate your site from the pack and give valuable information to your users.
Hey, they might even bookmark your site because they like the snide comments and cheat codes you provide.
If you use adsense or another “intelligent” ad system, this will help targeting.

Take this to other endeavors and you’ll see immediate advantages over a lot of the competition.

Search engine readable content is king

I still can not believe how many webmasters ignore this.

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I just read the article on doshdosh about volume blogging.

Although I tend to agree with some of the comments, stating that quality is key and volume blogging might also fit some blogs more than others, it has been my experience that volume will indeed drive traffic.

That said, the old simian should get to writing some more articles.

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Inspired by this post on Eli’s excellent blog:
http://www.bluehatseo.com/how-to-dupe-content-and-get-away-with-it/

The question that has to be asked here really is:
How does Google (and other engines) know that your content is duplicate content?

Obviously, this can not be a 1 to 1 matching, as any change (be it ever so small) would mark your text as original.

I presume (and Elis success with his techinque seems to confirm this) that the dupe chekers work along the lines of the duplicate finders used in academia, for example.

So how do those checks work?
Basically, a duplicate finder works in 3 steps:

1. Take x snippets from your text (normally those are chunks in varying lengths from 3-7 words)
2. Hit Google and other engines
3. Reanalyze sites / documents that return x positive matches.

Q: So, what to do about this?
A: Take more text from several sources and add to Eli’s techique.
Basically, what you want to do is this (in this example we take teeth whitening:

• Take text from 2-3 sources on teeth whitening
  You might not want to take the most poular sites for this. Hit some article directories and maybe even some forgotten archive.org sites.
• Mix the texts thoroughly.
  Take one sentence from here, another one from over there… leave a paragraph out.
  Add Eli’s techique.
  Change some words using Markov or manually.

Done.

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I got a question from one of my readers on my post Optimizing image search traffic :

Yes, helpful post indeed. A question - once you are getting traffic from images, can you tell what keywords are driving the traffic using Google Analytics? Using GA, images.google.com is treated as a referring site, without any information about the keywords that found the image. I’d like to know what keywords the image is being found on.

My answer:
As far as I can see, keywords gotten via image search are shown / counted as normal keywords.

The real world example I am basing this on:
One of my sites is getting a lot of hits via the keyword “Schnörkel”, which means something like flourish or embellishment.

This word does NOT appear anywhere on the page except for being the name of a small divider gif.

PS:
In that case, I renamed the image to div1.gif, as the traffic for that was no traffic I particularly cared about.

Over at Blogging Tips, you will find a perfectly easy tutorial on how to integrate adsense in your WordPress templates.

Now, young grasshoper, that you know how to get image search traffic to your site, you should focus on a worthier goal:

Targeted image traffic

I mentioned before, that I got one of my blogs onto the first image SERP for the term coffee.

Q: Did it help much?
A: Not really.

Keep in mind to get targeted image searches:

Optimize all your images that you want to appear in the image search and only those.

DON’Ts

• DON’T Give attributes to navigation images
  • Maybe even go as far as to name them something like navi_01.jpg, or menu_lower.gif
• DON’T give attributes / names to images NOT related to your keywords
  • If you have a cat picture on your ringtone page, name it pic01 .jpg, skip the title and alt tag

DO’s

• DO Give  EXTRA LOVING to  pictures that  are  related to your  niche
• DO Get high quality pictures, buy them if necessary!
• DO Don’t just call it smartphone.jpg, call it palm-treo-680.jpg
• DO Move some text describing the image into the same TD as the image (thanks, Eli)
• DO Don’t forget alt tags and title text
• DO Think about moving your affiliate link into a lightbox.

For all who have not yet read Deliguy’s great article on idea and money generation, step to it!
And don’t forget to check out his blog - Blue Hat SEO - always a good read.

I’ve spent the last few weeks generating two hundred ideas and am now entering the implementation stage.

I will keep you updated.

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