Little story. I love working on web stuff. Figuring out DOM, getting a grip on DHTML, copy-and-paste=learning JavaScript and PHP.. etc. etc. Just working away on our own home page. Family stuff about this and that, him and here, blah blah.
But still - you want visitors, rigth? You have that awful counter proudly displayed - now how to get it to tick? So finally in or around September 2002 I stopped just reading about SEO, I attempted to do it. First step was finding the right keyword - or rather; the right search *phrase*. I wasn't looking for anything spectacular - in fact, I strongly suspected the whole thing wouldn't work.
Using the free version of WordTracker I was quickly able to zoom in on a search phrase around specific content on my site that other sites apparently didn't use (I had no idea that WT only looked at meta data... anyway). I optimised for that phrase. Sure, WT reported that it was searched for only 10 times or so - but that is the free version... and 10 visitors was better than family only
The result was that within weeks I was number 1 for this specific search. A couple of weeks later a lot of related searches had me on number 1 or close to it. Now if you were to search MSN, Yahoo, Hotbot, Google, ask/jeeves my site still pops up as number 1~3.
In actual numbers it brings me 4000+ unique visitors per month for the optimised search phrase and related searches. That's really not bad for a personal site which doesn't try to sell anything
I'm now using WT (again, just the free version) to attempt to set up a content site which should be self-paid for by Amazon/Google ads
So,
disclaimer although very good at web work I don't claim to be an SEO pro.... but I do believe WT's results are close to being relevant. Why? Well, they query the SE's. They then show the top results. The SE's don't like pages with meta tags that say one thing and content pages that say something else. Make it too ridiclious and you're out. Therefor the meta tag content found in sites via WT is relevant.
Just try it: Google for "wordtracker relevant" and have a look at the meta data :-)
Ruud
I sure don't use metacrawlers. And I'm sure each of the major SEs has it's own more or less unique demographic. For instance, I'd expect business users to be less likely to use AOL SEarch or MSN Search ... but that's admittedly just a SWAG.
