58 replies to this topic

[OnlyTopResults]

It's easy to get ticked off when you spend a half hour of unpaid time for an unappreciative stranger who responds with sarcasm and not the slightest apparent understanding.

Yes Ian, you are entirely right and I am guilty as charged. The only poor excuse is to be found in the formula (don't I just love 'em):
"irritating client" + "4 large gin & tonics" = "unappreciative ***hole"

Your time is freely given and you are trying to help me, I apologise for seeming to be such an ungrateful prat!

I am just frustrated as hell after spending the past 2 weeks, full time, doing keyword and other research. I find practically no common data (far less maths) to give me any real comfort about pursuing the niche that seems so promising from say Wordtracker data and is absolutely nowhere according to Keyword Discovery. I fully appreciate the very different data sources they both use, but am frustrated as hell that they are both considered in high esteem by their respective legions of followers - yet serve up ENTIRELY different results! While natural search results versus PPC results are yet again another wild card to throw into the arena, there should still be SOME element of statistical comfort to be gained from keyword research - otherwise it truly is just a dart game. I believe it is not - and I damned well wanna find those 6 foot long darts to give me some advantage!

Randy made the point that SEO isn't like "painting by numbers" - and doubtless you would concur. Sadly, I'm not much of an artist and painting my garden fence is about as arty as I could get. Even then my analytical side would get in the way of my artistic expression by requiring me to measure the fence panels, calculate the quantity of paint required (taking the ambient temperature into account) and select the right width of paintbrush to cover the panels most efficiently. It's how I think, how I work - and in this SEO game seems to be a bloody nuisance

Hey-ho, on we go! I shall pay more attention to not being so obnoxious in future Ian, will try to keep my impatience and frustrations to myself!

Cheers
Adrian

Edited by OnlyTopResults, 29 July 2006 - 10:32 AM.

[themezoom]

Hi,

I understand you attitude a little better now.

You are not comfortable dealing anecdotal data.

The only real data you (or anyone) really wants is behind the firewall at Google. (and other search engines). That data is not available to the general public. The closest access we have to it is the "agenda-based" results from the Google Adwords account. (5.00 startup fee).

YOU WILL NOT GET THESE TOOLS TO AGREE ON DATA, and if you wait around for them to all agree . . . you will NEVER start a project or website.

I designed my own software with the knowledge that many of the highly trafficked keywords and phrases that show up in your webstats will never come up as "meaningul" or high KEI on any of these "keyword research tools".

My staff has tested this.

As a result, if you never get STARTED you do not have your own "effective keyword" keyword data that allows you "crack open the webstats dam" and start a flood of "expert verbiage" (remember those are specific keyword phrases) to your website.

This is why setting up the architecture of your site to target General or Specific phrases while carefully selecting THEMES and SILOS is the best way for you to get past "webmasters block"- in combination with using the LEAST OFFENSIVE anecdotal keyword tool to determine the "metatructure" and overall "market value" of your theme.

As you know very well, Google is probably the best way to do this . . . and I designed my own tools to use as many Google keywords, as well as as many keywords from as many other keyword tools as my hear desires . . . in order to compare the overal vertical market keywords to what I consider to be THE LEAST OFFENSIVE keyword database. (Google).

Thank Yoiu and Good Luck!

- Russell

Edited by themezoom, 29 July 2006 - 09:35 AM.

[OnlyTopResults]

The only real data you (or anyone) really wants is behind the firewall at Google. (and other search engines). That data is not available to the general public. The closest access we have to it is the "agenda-based" results from the Google Adwords account. (5.00 startup fee).

I am guessing that this free version does the same job Russell?
https://adwords.goog...stimatorSandbox

I have certainly been using it these past couple of weeks and it has given me yet another data set to glare at Of course she remains the leader of the pack so I must learn to coo and kiss Ms Google.

I am very familiar with running Adwords campaigns, tailoring different product ads to different landing pages, monitoring and adjusting bid values, etc. I have been doing this for clients for the past couple of years - with a degree of success (modesty prevents me from saying more ) Creating sites with Adsense in mind requires a different set of tricks of course and it's rather interesting to look at the same subject from a different perspective.

YOU WILL NOT GET THESE TOOLS TO AGREE ON DATA, and if you wait around for them to all agree . . . you will NEVER start a project or website.

Oh I have started it, have the basic site design tied down today and the 1st 7 pages of content (which is all there is to Phase 1). I just wish I could start approaching the Directories with more certainty that this niche will work in an Adsense context.

I designed my own software with the knowledge that many of the highly trafficked keywords and phrases that show up in your webstats will never come up as "meaningul" or high KEI on any of these "keyword research tools".

I am familiar with your new software and the Silo approach. Indeed I have designed this 1st mini-site around the very silo principles you suggest. I can't afford the subscription to your new tool just yet, but must make do with other publicly available sources of data (however random they may be).

Despite lots of swearing and grumbling I shall start submitting my 1st site at the beginning of next week. Of course, following The Plan, I will then follow on immediately with the next project, one a week, etc. The first 5 projects are already identified and I must just stop worrying that attacking this sector is based on sand - and see what happens. These 5 projects all have separate Themes, though are in the same medical sector with which I am very familiar (I have an MSc in biology).

So - onwards and upwards and to hell with the numbers eh?

Thanks for your comments.

Cheers
Adrian

[Jill]

I shall start submitting my 1st site at the beginning of next week.

If you're talking about submitting to search engines, you can skip that step.

[redsonia!]

Good post, Ian. 

Anyway you can't claim any record for the shortest posting, RedSonia has beaten you fair and square.  Not sure about the added value of her post, but I'm sure it will become more apparent when I too may become "wise". 

Gee, I didn't know that every post was required to be some profound discourse. I was very politely showing my appreciation for Ian's efforts. As he pointed out, he spent quite a bit of time trying to explain a concept to you (and the other newbies on the forum). Believe me, I appreciate all the work and the knowledge the professionals here are willing to pass on to the rest of us. A little appreciation from you would also go a long way. (And by the way, I have a Ph.D. in Physiology! )

Oh, yeah. No offense taken.

(Sorry guys, I'm a little testy in this 100+ degree weather.)

[noel_x99]

Ian - you posted some great stuff. I do hope you keep in mind that postings don't just help the single person that posts the question.

Posts containing that kind of info (and some great analogies) are useful to many others - other members, lurkers, newbies and people that had never even previously heard of highrankings.com.

I can't count the number of times that I've been helped by this forum and others. I constantly marvel at the generosity of all you people that constantly share wonderful information to all of us that need help!

Thanks to you and all the others that generously spend their time helping others.

[themezoom]

Hi Adrian,

Bottom line is you do NOT need Theme Zoom or any other "paint-by-numbers" approach to properly research and silo (create architecture) for a given theme.

As far as the Google Adwords Sandbox tool . . . sure beats overture. Let me clarify how I would use it.

Google is GREAT for THEMES, for looking into GENERAL keywords and topics that lead to DIRECT SALES and then analysing the "expert verbiage" used on the websites ranked highly for those themes. So I use Google to discover GENERAL or "broad" themes to become nominated for Silos and then I look at a large number of competitors that are ranked highly for those BROAD (general) keyword terms and phrases. THEN the real work begins.

You drill into all of those competing websites and extract all of the various keywords tied to your themes of interest. You analyze them for boith PPC value and "expert verbiage" value using TRI function.

At that point it is all about writing great content and finding a PRO to do it.

I use content composer software to do this. ; - )

If you find a traditional subject matter expert writer on a topic, and hand him a list of expert verbiage terms and say . .. "dude or dudette, please fit all of these statistically improbably phrases somewhere in your article on this topic" . . . most professional writers will laugh at you.

But keyword-creative writing is becoming more of a trend . . . I met some folks at the SEO conference that do this sort of integration, making big bucks doing it.

I do all of that myself, because I really care about the qualtiy of my content on every single page of my website empire. I make sure that staff and ghostwriters meet the standaards and qualification of expert writers. Writers are everything to me. If you are a good writer, I love you. Writing will be all that matters. ( Especailly when Google starts digitizing the human SOUL for spidering and uploading . . . my question is will it be a FREE upload like Google Video?) :

www.keyworduniversity.com/future-of-google.pdf

mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/

But Amit at Google seems to think it is all about Audio spidering and speech retrieval . . . and I tend to agree:

singhal.info/

Adrian,

I am glad to hear that you started your projects . . . just start getting some traffic rolling into your web stats and start writing more about what people are attracted to you writing about . . . and so on.

- Russell

P.S. -

Google sandbox is NOT always great for selecting expert (ultra-specific) verbiage. In fact, within TZ I turn off our own keyword quality standard function when importing terms from wordtracker, KDiscovery, or Amazon statistically improbable phrases. This is because I am more interested in the TRI (theme relevance index) of the overall keyword or phrase. Google sandbox is designed to promote "direct sales" keywords, with "educational process" (indirect sales) keywords being less expensive and more seasonal on the traffic estimator tool. ; - ) Google adwords does NOT make the bulk of its money on "educational-indirect sales" keywords that are best for ranking highly on natural (ummm . . . free traffic) engines. My passion about TZ and the creation of it is designed to bridge the gap between these two worlds PPC (themes and direct sales) versus (expert verbiage - educational process) . . . and version 2.0 is what you will find us doing at 2 a.m.. ; - )



<live links removed, see [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?act=boardrules]Forum Rules[/url] >

Edited by chrishirst, 30 July 2006 - 04:29 PM.

[Jill]

Russell...hate to say this, but your posts (especially this last one) mostly sound like a HUGE load of BS to me...

I don't even know where to begin to dispute it all, because the whole thing just doesn't even make any sense.

Perhaps you meant this to be an isos post?

[OnlyTopResults]

If you're talking about submitting to search engines, you can skip that step.

No Jill - I was talking about submitting to PR3+ Directories to start the spidering process. I never submit sites directly to SEs, I'm sure most people (on here) will know better than that.

XX
Adrian

[themezoom]

Wow.

She speaks!

Thanks Jill, I will try very hard not to take that to heart!

Its likely that I did not make myself very clear. My guys are telling me not to waste too much time in forums anyway . . . so this is probably a GOOD thing. ; - ) It is ADDICTIVE!

- Russell

P.S. -

I was going to have someone review the last couples of posts to determine if I was "full of crap" as you were indicating- as far as facts. Sue will usually tell me if I am being . . . "eccentric". (I think I was with the SOUL uploading comments and other tangent topics). But after giving it a little thought I decided that the core of your comment is an overall value indicator as to my contribution to your forum.

Since I am not making any sense to you I will exit with just the basic premise of where I get my ideas. At least at a basic level. I will leave the citiations for you to comment on as you see fit. It is, afterall, your forum.

1.

www.worldtalkradio.com/archive.asp?aid=5912 talk 3 is most useful, although I think the main guy behind 'silo" concepts was Bruce. We have some major areas where we differ. I don't feel that most of Bruce's people have a full on grasp of Silo structures as it relates to offline and online research.

www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/0505/silo.html

2.

The basic keyword structures that (your own) Dan T. talks about in his book covers basic themeing. It is in a basic format, but it starts to cover the difference between keywords and expert verbiage. I know you are buds with him and stuff - so sure you already read it.

3.

Found this interesting. Not sure what your optinion is of it. It is about the hilltop theory.

www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Egeorgem/hilltop/


4.

Loved this article on Topic Sensitive page rank too. We have verified things in our research and influenced a LOT of our themeing ideas.

www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/127/

5.

And of course there is YOUR book on (Page Rank Uncovered) written a while back. This always an inspiring read- along with "patterns in unstructured data" on LSI and a case study on Latent Semantic Indexing.

I followed with interest your forum post on Latent Semantic Indexing awhile back, and found all of those posts . . . educational and amusing.

Thanks Jill, and NO the post was NOT meant for . . . what was the name of that blog again?

- Russell

Edited by Randy, 31 July 2006 - 08:36 PM.

[themezoom]

Apology to Ian:

Ian,

Someone I respect told me that my response to the post that you worked on called "What causes sickness in humans" was both trite and thoughtless. (This person was on my team). Yikes.

I want to apologize for the response the belittled the effort of your post, and the very VALID logic that you provided with each point. I think I was suffering from "answering-stupid-email-itus" and was simplifying things in a way that was very unprofessional. That is still no excuse to mow over the professional points you were making with "me-agenda".

Your points are extremely valid as I re-read your underlying point.

Essentailly the best one can hope for, and I agree with this, is to become "less imperfect" than other websites within your world. And you can "focus" on either value to the visitor or "high rankings".

For me, the most important thing you said was"

The "it depends" comes from the fact that most SEO's are not willing to just walk away from the rankings, and will try to achieve both goals by blending the two methods.

You also added:

What you should be asking is "how do I fit the exact terms into natural text as much as possible?" this is a question of art, and 5 writers may come up with 10 different ways, so there is no template. You have to do it yourself, based on your knowledge of your industry.

It is funny you should say that. When I start revealing artful methods . . . generally I start losing people- or their "BS meter" starts to go off. But then again, many of my wealthy business partners of told me as soon as anyone mentions the word "SEO" in the boardroom, peoples "BS meter" starts to go off before anything gets started. This is because SEO is generally an artform to one degree or another.

"Has the internet destroyed good writing"?

Furthermore, you cannot really give a beginner a good understanding of market research driven keyword research combined with website architecture inside a forum or a cryptic post.

In my comment about singular problem singular solution following your post, I was actually not only trying to be silly and rude.

I have been fascinated by "Singular Value Decomposition" and how it ties into LSI and other theoretical forms of text retrieval. You said that you share a lot of your more "obscure or abstract" ideas in that 'spider-food' forum. I should be very interested to see what you have to say about:

Latent Semantic Indexing.

crd.lbl.gov/~cding/papers/lsilong6.pdf

Singular Decay and Singular Value Decomposition.

repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2182&context=lbnl


Speech Retrieval Topics.

Finding Hierarchy in all dimensions

www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/malcolm/pubs/acm-mm2001/Slaney2001(ACMHierarchicalSegmentation).pdf

Thanks Ian, for spending non-billable time for your forum folks.

- Russell Wright

Edited by Randy, 31 July 2006 - 08:38 PM.

[DanThies]

Most people search in what is called FINDALL mode, where word order and proximity are not really important.

Michael,

Word order and proximity are very important - check any 2 or 3 word search term and change the word order. The results will be different. It is precisely because word order and proximity are important, that using words naturally (including stop words like "of") is the best approach for search queries that will include stop words.

For example, if you search for "symptoms of arrogance and ignorance" the closest text matches will be those pages that have used those words naturally, vs. pages that say "symptoms arrogance ignorance."

[Michael Martinez]

Word order and proximity are very important - check any 2 or 3 word search term and change the word order. The results will be different. It is precisely because word order and proximity are important, that using words naturally (including stop words like "of") is the best approach for search queries that will include stop words.

It's not that cut-and-dried, Dan. Word frequency and rarity have an impact on FIND ALL mode searches, and their results can vary by query term order because the search engine places emphasis on the first word in the query.

[DanThies]

It's not that cut-and-dried, Dan.  Word frequency and rarity have an impact on FIND ALL mode searches, and their results can vary by query term order because the search engine places emphasis on the first word in the query.

Right... got that... I do this stuff for a living... so if the search engine places emphasis on the first word in the query, wouldn't you say that the word order is important? As opposed to "not really important?"

3 different SERPs, from Google:
symptoms of bowel cancer
symptoms bowel cancer
bowel cancer symptoms

[DanThies]

No Jill - I was talking about submitting to PR3+ Directories to start the spidering process.

Just a suggestion, rather than just looking at the Google toolbar's PR meter with directories, you might want to check whether the category page you are submitting to is even indexed, and if so whether it's in the Supplemental index or the main index. The syntax for that search @ Google is info:URL, as in info:http://www.highrankings.com