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Ok Boo Boo…. What a lovely picinic basket…. Time for a Yogi snack…

Well it’s an interesting approach.. Tho somewhat like trying to sell cigarettes by opening up a gas station.. He he… the effort and expense is on the wrong emphasis.

There are a lot of potential areas of concern for me in this. The main one is that we’re not directly attacking the core service/product here. The main theme of the site is NOT the main source of revenue or interest to the visitors. That may work for Nic here at SR ( advertising is his gig ) I wouldn’t consider it a stable plan of action for a consumer goods shop.

Any profitable terms are going to take time, effort and cash. Or it wouldn’t be worth having now would it? I understand the thinking, I would simply approach it differently.

Ultimately we want to be in the business of selling the furniture so I would, from the outset, make that the primary function of the site. This is not only good for search engines, but good for the end user ultimately. Looking to monetize the Baby names aspect is far less palatable. If you manage to get the traffic boon, then AdSense and onsite advertising are the main options available. Probably not what U had in mind long term….

So how do we deal with your targeting issues? Simply make the baby names section an entity WITHIN the core site. You can easily set about targeting the SEO efforts for those terms to the main page of that section and subsequent interior pages. There is nothing that says U need the home page to be about a particular topic. Sure, it helps some, but it can be worked around. The core offering is still somewhat relative which will be fine.

This also opens the door for other sub-sections of the site such as articles, a forum or whatever else U can think of…. Without tainting the core offering we ultimately want the Ses to know us by.

SO what of the core site/offering? That will take time to build up in the search rankings ( SERPs ) .. In the mean time;

Work on what are called ‘long tail’ terms…. In your case it may be actual product names that you feel your competitive in, related industry terms and the less competitive aspects related to baby furniture.  Generally speaking we advise to use PPC ( AdWords ) while you are working the organic traffic sources ( SEO ) and work back the PPC as rankings take hold. I will venture a guess your not looking to spend on PPC, thus the approach U have devised… Oui?



In the end building a business around a ‘so called’ non-competitive term ( consider the source ) may not be the way to go. More often than not there is a reason a given term is weak in the competition dept…. it’s because it’s not worth a whole lot.  Now do we want to necessarily base our business model on a market segment that is not a money make? Of course not. This is something to be considered here. Not to mention the limited data sets you have used for the research.. Putting all our eggs in one basket on limited intelligence is simply asking for a visit from Mr. Murphy.

Can U send me the URL if you don't want to post? Would help some here .. give me an idea of what we're working with.....

Ok.. to start with, cross linking schemes are really that easy to do and actually pass link value. You see, the SEs have what has been termed 'Owner Profiles' which basically looks at who owns a site ( domain registration) as well as the physical location of the site ( IP address ) to asses inter-relationships. So, he may be simply cross promoting his web holdings as par for the course of marketing not for the link love... I own all of the sites in my Sig, but keep them on the same server and ownership.... I am not interested in the small bit of link love I'd get really....



So while you’re chasing ‘picnic basket’ and ‘picnic baskets’ start working the long tail and related terms which would b easier to obtain rankings for.

Long tail ;  semantically related terms to our core target term

Buy picnic baskets
Antique picnic baskets
Wicker picnic baskets
Vintage picnic basket ( my research shows this is a juicy one )
Picnic gift baskets
English style picnic baskets
longaberger picnic basket
picnic basket set
picnic basket sets


Related; this would be the secondary traffic related to the site.

Picnic coolers
Picnic packs
Wine basket
Picnic supplies
Outdoor recipes
Picnic safety
History of Picnics
picnic basket set
kids picnic games
picnic accessories



… you get the idea….. Keep in mind I am throwing stuff out there, more formal KW/Phrase research would be advisable prior to deciding which ones to go after.

So we chase the more achievable terms to start bringing in traffic where we can - al the while still hammering on our core terms.

You should have a read as well on the ‘SEO Site Review’ thread I started as you’ll get some more ideas on how to go about optimizing pages and creating a structure to target varied terms in the SEO program.
http://forums.site-reference.com/topic/ … te-Review/

Well, keep in mind some of the semantically related ones I put are more for building around the core term as much as it is for any type of traffic. As I said, I haven’t done much in the way of research into the ones I listed… I just ran a quick report and spit out some examples…. Any further and I’d have to bill U… lol

I am not an fan of ANY SINGLE DATA SET ( ie; single tool ) as it can leave one vulnerable to consistency issues that would be dangerous to base an entire SEO campaign upon. So use a variety of tools ( word tracker, Keyword Discovery, NicheBot and other online tools ) to get a better over-all picture of what are the best potential targets/related phrases and so on. In the end, without actual Google data, there is plenty of room for error. There are plenty of people, myself included, that will tell you about targeting certain terms simply to find out they are a dog when top SERPs are reached…. Educated guesses are the name of the game.. Though I find over the years I have gotten better at it.

One of the main problems most of these tools have is the ‘competition’ factor.. Which is used in KEI and RATIO scores. U see, once upon a time they only used to TOTAL results for a search term in the SERPS ( ie; 1 out of 120000 results ) … this isn’t truly competition but total instances returned by the SE.

To get closer to an actual ‘competition’ number I like to also look at the same search with some other adaptations;

Term - Picnic baskets

Total - 1 950 000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … ic+baskets

Quotations - 650 000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … baskets%22

Intitle - 15 400
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … baskets%22

Inurl - 3490
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … baskets%22


Now take those and run them on another term to see the comparison


Term Picnic Basket

Total - 2 090 000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … nic+basket

Quotations - 854 000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … +basket%22

Intitle - 22 400
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … +basket%22

Inurl - 937
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … +basket%22

Except for the INURL data, it would seem ‘picnic baskets’ is slightly less competitive than ‘picnic basket’ .. though I would be on the fence due to the INURL data since the site/page naming conventions can play a substantial role surprisingly..

The point being, is that the tools around that give KEI or RATIO data can get skewed real fast depending on what they use as the COMPETITION number…. Since it is a key part of the equation in both… so never take what U get from a single tool as the ‘way to go’ .. you could be surprised. Understanding how the data is collected and calculated is important as well as varied tools/data sources for your research.

Huff.. Puff…. Good Morning!!!

GP Michal wrote:

Interesting and helpful evaluation.  As usual, thanks a lot!

Speaking about URL naming conventions, can you explain to me why I see a .htm (or.html) extension after some page URL's and others I don't.  Is doing it one way better than the other?  The only thing I can think of is that if you have a .htm extension in the URL some of the SE's won't let you submit the page.  I heard it was a good practice to submit a NEW page singularly in order to get it indexed quicker.  I also heard one could do this with a link partners page after seeing which page he added your reiprocal link on in order to get credit for the link quicker.

yeaaaggggghhhhhh ...... No no no... submitting to SEs is useless and a great way to tell if your potential SEO provider/resource is a looogan.....

..and honestly, I am not much of a fan of recips, now more than ever. From what I have seen over the evolution of the algo thinking at Google, they should be next to worthless anytime soon. As it is I find it highly unlikely that they carry much weight in the ranking/link profile assessment. Google is getting weirder and weirder on backlinks.

Unless you have put a page on your site that is actually a target page (or sub target page) for an SEO campaign, there is not much need to even worry about it. Your site wil have a predetermined crawl/indexation schedule based on a variety of factors such as site age, freshness, backlinks and so on. Non-target pages will get processed and credited in due course... post them and move on.

Now if it's an actual target page related to the over-all SEO campaign, then we will ultimately need back links to that page to make it of any value to our process. The act of the link building will by itself bring the SEs back to that page .. so it is not only getting indexed, but indexed with at least ONE pre-existing backlink.

Furthermore, if you get a quality backlink on an authority site that has a higher crawl/indexation rate than your site, you would likely get that page indexed faster than you would by simply waiting for your sites next scheduled visit.

Get it??

Oh, and there is no real benefit nor disadvantage in the file type ( HTML, PHP, ASP) extensions

Last edited by TheGypsy (2007-09-07 12:27:39)

Well that probalby depends on the example...

It could be a directory structure such as www.whateversite.tld/key-word

Or they could be doing a mod rewrite on the actual call to the server....

Have an example?

GP Michal wrote:

Yup...

You see....I've never had to create directories because I've been using Storesonline templates and they have everything set up.  So, I guess that when I get around to rebuilding my site, I'll create a folder on my hard drive called "Basket4Picnic Website" (or someting similar).  In this root-directory folder I'll start creating and saving my HTML page files for my site.  i.e. my "gifts" page would be saved as "/gifts.htm".  When I create the URL for this page, I think I can write it as "http://www.basket4picnic.com/gifts" (without the .htm extension) and the browser will be able to open and display the page because it will assume the page is in HTML format and will automatically add the .htm extension if it needs to.

Of course, any advice on how to set up the directory tree would be much appreciated....hint...hint...

Ha ha ha... yeah man.. I think I shall start U a thread for this one... we need some work here as well..... man..... Maybe I should make U SEO site review #2 ..... whatcha think?

I am actively looking for another victim.....


Anyways, let me go write up some basics on the directory structure stuff.......

There ya go M8 -- http://forums.site-reference.com/viewto … 978#p44978