Half’s SEO Notebook

I’m still kinda irked at myself for not buying myself a PS3 this Xmas, but I guess I’ll get over it. Anyway, I hope you guys are having a great holiday.

The real reason I’m posting though, is I was looking through my traffic tracker log tonight, and I saw another hit on this page I wrote about supplemental results for the term “supplemental hell.” It’s a zero-competition (~525 websites referencing the exact phrase), close-to-nil traffic query term (0 searches a month according to Overture), and makes me absolutely no money, but I’ve been stuck in 2nd place below Jim Boykin for a while, and I wanted to try ranking one spot higher.

You might have noticed I recently added “aka supplemental hell” to the page title, though I doubt that was enough, since ranking stayed the same when Google refreshed the page’s cache. And those cheap blogdrive links have been there since, like, forever.

Ok, so at least temporarily, I got what I wanted. But this is a good reminder to not neglect keyword research - because, the truth is, ranking for “supplemental hell” doesn’t do me any good - at least in the short term - for paying my bills. In contrast, I got a different non-SEO related page ranking 1st for a money term right now, and with conversion at ~1:150 (last period: 1:161; previous period:1:197; peroid before that:1:62), sales just keep coming and coming (knock on wood). And the difference in conversions once the page hit 1st place was rather dramatic. I was like, “where the hell are all these sales coming from? And what’s up with ultra low ratios?” (previously, I was converting at ~1:600+, and niche average ratio can fall anywhere between 1:300 and 1:1200. 1:62 is like, insanely good, though I admit I have another page averaging 1:35ish over the last 3 months.).

So I strongly disagree with those who think SEO is not about ranking. It’s not JUST about ranking - hopefully that we can all agree on.