The KFC approach! By Richard Igoe Using Pay-per-click search campaigns like AdSense on Google will get you guaranteed traffic but they cost money - you are buying the traffic - and as large corporations are wising up to this method of promotion there is more competition for the most popular keywords, bringing these prices out of reach of the small business. There is however still plenty of scope here to bid for the less common search terms, particularly in niche markets. Despite the monopolisation of top search engine results by pay-per-click engines, remember that over 70% of the first page results on the common major search engines are still based on the indexed results. Yes, there are also the directories where your submissions are reviewed by a real person before being indexed, but with the enormous growth of the internet, it is impossible to directorise the whole web using experts, and to keep reviewing them! Good Search engines constantly crawl the web thus ensuring results are relatively current. And when Yahoo does not have a listing for a particular search, it defaults to the search results provided by a spider engine - (currently Google). Spider-driven search engines will continue to play a major role in the way people find information. The more reliable a search engine's results, the more popular it will become and the more traffic you will get! Some search engines rank your pages according to the meta tags alone, others on the content, and others on both meta tags and content. You may be surprised to learn that the keywords and description META tags do not boost your web page ranking on some of the major search engines. To confuse the issue, the search engines are constantly changing their goalposts. Pages that rank high this month may not even come close next month! You used to be able to "trick" the search engine spiders but now this is an automatic one-way ticket to the banned web-page list! So what is the answer now? The Keyword Focused Content (KFC) Approach. Highly focused pages which are full of good content are exactly what the search engines want. But if you design a page for "product X" then your meta tags and your content should be about "product X". You can design a separate page for each of your products or services - and each benefit of each product or service - and each ... you get the picture! The old approach was to design doorway pages, each optimised for a different search engine and keyword and then wait, somtimes months to see your results because some search engines take ages to index you! And what works now may not work in 6 months time. The keyword-focused content approach gives you pages that are not only rich in keywords but also provide good quality content, making them directory and search engine "friendly". They are pages that give a "best-fit" for all the major search engines. The pages that rank high on one search engine this month might rank further down next crawl, but the same pages might have a higher ranking on a different search engine that uses different search criteria. Instead of spending your time on the optimisation process you can spend more time on creating the content that the search engines need to provide their users. We have seen that search engines which give reliable results get a good reputation and become popular - which leads to more traffic. Search engines will continually refine their search results process to provide what their users are searching for, so ultimately a good content page can't be wrong. Also if your site is not content-rich, the directories like Yahoo may not want it! This approach does not rule out optimisation of your pages. They should still be optimised to give a best-fit solution. What it does do however is allow you to produce a large quantity of highly relevant web pages. You can keep on writing about what you know and adding more pages. Your website will soon become a fount of knowledge for the products or services that YOU sell. For more information on keyword-focused content pages go to http://www.thewebseye.com/keyword-focused.htm. ---------------------------------------------- Article Copyright by Richard Igoe - http://www.TheWebsEYE.com - for the latest Website software. You may distribute this article freely as long as the above information remains intact.