There was an old saying that comes to mind, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, will it make a sound?”, similarly if your website is optimized using SEO for a specific keywords and no one uses it to find your website, is it worth it?
Value is Relative
To answer that question, yes… just as value is relative to application, does the tree have more purpose as a bridge across the stream than standing upright before it fell? It all depends on who is on the path and what their needs are at the time.
Similarly, some keywords act as bridges to tie vast segments of synonyms and more competitive keywords together. Their latent value (building authority) vs. their immediate value (as keywords that appear in search engines) are often misunderstood when it comes to increasing relevance within a site.
For many obsessively checking your websites keyword positioning and rankings around the clock is common. Although the behavior may border on the tendency of being myopic about SEO, the true focus should be capturing market share. With both market share and authority, you can launch as many keywords as you like and sculpt which ones rise and stay at the top.
Will all of your keywords convert? Probably not, but the value they create for organic SEO are all pivotal points that anchor and impact the overall reputation of your website. There is no magic bullet with keyword positioning, the real secret is to focus on market share and funnel as many overlapping keywords to the most appropriate pages capable of converting into a sale.
The tendency to overlook the vast amount of authority latent within a website is common. Often a few fresh links from the right places is all it takes to take a page off the shelf and put it back into circulation in search engines.
Links Provide Authority, Navigation and Exploration
Links are like the lifeblood of a website, without them there would be no navigation from page to page or website to website, hence their importance is paramount for the user experience. Similarly, links are also the passages that search engines utilize to assess the quality and context of web pages.
So, to search engines, if your website does not have any new links, this equates to “it must not be that important”. Otherwise, if it were, more people would reference the page or visit it (or you would reinforce it with links of your own internally).
In either case, since everything leaves a trail or digital footprint online, metrics used to gauge user engagement for content is collected from a variety of methods. The bottom line is, does that page have authority or not?
If it doesn’t, then you can step in to make adjustments by going back to latent pages within your website and editing the content to work in tandem with other key components of your websites conversion objectives.
Considering it pruning off-topic or lackluster copy while adding a few internal links to ball roll multiple pages into a coherent mass of topical relevance (in other words, the Wikipedia effect on a smaller scale).
The Ebb and Flow of Publishing Cycles
The power of the publisher and who has dominate syndication and indexing in search engines is where ranking battles are daily won and lost. With authority under your belt, every page in your domain has the potential to reach the masses with your message. The colossal stance of media and search and closely tied, which means newsworthy content rises to the top.
Although it may eventually subside in a few weeks, content ages and typically within 3 months it has enough page rank and reputation to hold its own in search engines.
The key is to constantly monitor the cycles of what content you publish, which keywords are prominent and what internal and external links are peaking within the cycles of link weight rising and falling as variables have a tendency to normalize over time.
The Power of Syndication
Based on the usefulness of the content it is then shuffled to a latent state (similar to hibernation or a being archived in a secondary index). Then when enough keywords are combined or enough links rouse it from its sleep, the page makes its presence known again when invoked from a query.
The way to keep your pages from going into hibernation is supply a steady flow of links (either from internal links or external links) to ensure that spiders keep the page in mind as a relevant resource.
The real value is to have sleepers for relevant terms as well as constantly adding more pages for future tense rankings.
The power of keyword stemming can be immense as 80% of the queries in search engines are new and unique.
You never know the types of phrases people will use, so, by blanketing a plethora of keywords and key phrases, you hedge your odds of appearing at the helm of a long-tail search. In essence, your website can devour a market, literally one keyword at a time.
You guys write such good stuff, it really is starting to make sense of SEO. I have got hundreds of posts that I wrote without a clue of deep linking, or what Google was after, but I have a better picture in my head now and am grouping posts about specific topics together, linking them together. Maybe one day it will pay off. If nothing else, I already made $5 more in December than all last year. cheers
btw, any posts on portals and SEO? I am trying to scale up my site and wondered what you need to look out for a homepage /portal that is apparently just a mass of links. Dont they all lose value having so many?
Ed:
Thanks for the comment and we appreciate you stopping by. To answer your question, yes, too many links (typically more than 50 per page) is unnatural and will more than likely flag search engines to omit that page. Try breaking the links up and interjecting them with context to create context in between. You need a healthy text to link ratio to appease spiders.