I can't explain my thoughts on that example site any better than I already have. Yes, it is good quality content, albeit in its most basic form. It's basic content presented in an optimal way, although a site like that can easily make money which is the idea. It's well written, informative, original, and provides many sub-topics to the original content.

It's also not spam and it's far from "nothing in particular." It's actually the exact opposite of that and I'm surprised you disagree. It is targeted to something very particular and provides information on it.

Someone trying to learn about the different types of pink motorcycle helmets might land on that page and that page describes the different types of helmets they can find. It also discusses important things to know before buying one. Are you not aware that certain people search for things like "types of pink motorcycle helmets" and might want to know the different types of them? And you can list the different types of them and provide information? It gives very basic information because it's a quick example of how to present content.

If that were my site, other than the standard WP design (which they don't advocate keeping), I would keep the information on there the way it is, only I'd expound heavily on it and provide more examples.

I'll pick up the torch for a second then.

Getting from nothing to http://www.scootersam.com is unbelievably hard if you're not already familiar with building websites; the vast majority of people wouldn't know where to start or even the options available to them. Truthfully, the only thing that's even "wrong" with that site is that it isn't skinned, which is easily solvable. Even something as simple as registering a domain and pointing the A record towards the Wordpress installation stops most people cold. Paying ~$30/month for a How-to guide and friendly forum helpers is a stupidly good deal.

As someone who has to look at countless websites made by non-professionals, I can tell you that this is miles above what the average person can achieve [in content quality].

@Phresh @Fist fair enough maybe it's not as bad as I thought (I know I'm quite prejudiced about these sorts of things lol)

This really isn't true imo, and that link from SEOmoz is nice and all but $33/m > $99/m. As I've attempted the above and often got snarky responses, or no replies at all, or replies where I needed to ask a followup to understand wtf they were talking about and never got a response to the followup. For like 10% of the people interested in gaining a solid to above average grasp of SEO/IM etc just random blog searching, reading **** through google, asking random questions on blogs etc can help launch them...for all the other ******s like me etc...a structured site like TKA is way more useful and makes the whole process seem way less daunting so I might actually attempt it with some chance of success.

Now I'm lazy so I signed up and never got around to creating any sites...but for $33 a month with the 1st month free its a steal compared to what is out there.

The majority of the people on 2+2 are in the ****** category like me, even if they won't admit it.

I agree with Fist and Gullanian both.

The site is structurally better than decent, however it clearly exists only to SERP for niche keywords and will probably have AdChoices/AdSense/affiliates plastered above the fold any day now. No human searching for the terms this site is gaming for is going to be pleased with the content they find there, and this sort of site is exactly what Google is trying to stomp out these days because it's annoying to the web surfers who are G's customers.

Curiously, what do you think someone is looking for when they search for "types of pink motorcycle helmets?" I think coupling that information with affiliate ads to various pink motorcycle helmets is fine content and provides the user with what they want, as well as additional helpful information.

The information is fluffed a lot, that's my problem with it. There's a lot of words for very little actual information.

Examples:

That sentence is worthless except from a SEO point of view and contains nothing of value to the reader. It seems to be artefacts of paying for content where the writer just writes fluff sentences like this to reach their word count target.

From this perspective, I think TKA can make sense. If you don't have the technical skills and don't previously know how to set up a website, don't know or have a familiarity with HTML, CSS, PHP and SQL the guide can be helpful.

The content may be structured correctly, but it is awful for providing help for a visitor to the site. I hate when sites like the example come up because they do not offer what I am searching for and are painfully written. I had no interest in following a guide that would produce a site I would not want to use, link, bookmark or come up in a search result.

I guess I'll just have to agree to disagree. I'm sick of discussing it.

Both are right.

The real problem is that there are some topics that are able to be expressed in a picture/video, but don't necessarily rank highly with search engines.

With the new Panda update, Google's emphasis is on longer content (500+ word articles). But what if you have a "pink motorcycle helmet"? While your image would rank in the images search, it wouldn't in the traditional search results page due to the brevity. This is just one of the many situations where attracting quality traffic looks bizarre, because it's difficult to accommodate both spider and user. For the moment, "fluff" content is a necessary evil unless you're a backlink gaining machine.

Obligatory eHow link to show this in action. A few pictures are WAY better than 500 words, but it won't rank. "Fruit platter ideas" search: ranks #12 in Google, #1 in Bing. 1600 search volume per month (phrase).

Im gonna go ahead and use TKA, I have no experience wrt making a website or anything of that nature. I agree the content is basic but to start off I think it is a solid program.

However: In the process they use The Keyword Dominator, and apparently that is temporarily down, does anyone know of a subsitute that cost roughly the same (or less)?

Google's keyword tool.

It's free, and it looks like thekeyworddominator is just a wrapper around it anyway, so the data you'll get is the same. Perhaps some of the included tools are worth the fee, perhaps not. I have been disappointed in other popular keyword tools like WordTracker.

I tried WordTracker and that was dumb.

I like the features that thekeyworddominator, atleast in TKA theres a step that you set up your keywords based on features that keywrod dominator has that Googles Free one does not.

one thing to consider is you and just about every person on this message board are not your typical internet user.

The typical internet user is going to lick on their monitor while playing a game from Zynga.

The subject got brought up so I thought I would share my experience to add to the thread. I do agree with Phresh that the discussion of TKA is played out and is no longer adding to the thread so I am also going to stop.

Phresh care to share any of the sites u created but are going to kill and a little background info on how you decided to create it, your process in creating it, and where u think you went wrong?

I'm not killing them and I don't think they went wrong. I just think I have way too many sites and focusing on having 3-5 really strong, frequently updated sites is better than going back and forth and dabbling in like 15 of them. I think it's good to have a large stable of sites early on though. It's good to test out niches and see which ones pan out and are worth pursuing before you dump a lot of money and/or time into them. HubPages used to serve as a pretty good indicator of that as well, but Panda kinda crapped on that site so it's not as useful in determining things. Their rankings dropped HUGE for a while, but have recently come back with the addition of their subdomains, but they changed the way their ads are positioned so your CTR isn't very solid anymore. It's still useful and probably a good thing for beginning IMers to mess with, just not as good as it used to be.

Edit: HubPages is a site that lets you post articles and earn a % of the AdSense earnings. It's a good thing for early IMers to use as the pages are easy to make, you don't need an entire domain, HubPages is a very established site so you can rank high early on, etc. You get 60% of the earnings and will have stats provided for you. You can also add Amazon/eBay widgets to the pages as well for further monetization. It's frequently used to IMers to test the CPC/CTR of certain niches to see if they're worth building entire sites for. It's also a good use for support articles to backlink your money sites. I recommend it to people who might want to try their hand at any IMing stuff without buying a site.

I'll probably update the old sites with some better information, throw on some affiliate ads, and then just let them age. I'll check back on them periodically to see if their rankings change, and if they do, scheduling some links to them might be in the cards. In general though, I'll probably just let them sit and hang out.

Phresh, are the articles moderated in any way in hubpages? Like, could you put affiliate links in them too?

Can this be the place to ask noob SEO questions?

Do result clicks factor into PageRank? If I search for a keyword and click my own site a lot of times, will its go up for that keyword? How about related keywords? If yes, what scale of clicks are we talking about (hundreds, tens of thousands?), and does Google penalize results for many clicks from the same IP in a short timespan?

Semantics, but it sounds like you mean SERPs rather than PageRank.

http://www.jm-seo.org/seo-tips/20101014a.html

"Answer: -
No one really knows for certain... But many people do think that clicks from Google do matter. More clicks is better. Less back tracking is better... Being a 'Google Detective,' we might surmise that they would look at click behavior - do people click over to a site? If so, do they stay there or do they return to the search page and click on another link? That is a very easy way for Google to get user feedback.

This then implies... 1) Fix your keywords to match the target searches, 2) make your tags ACCURATELY describe your content, so people are not disappointed when they land, and 3) make your site enticing and relevant, again so people do not click back.

Ultimately having accurate relevant tags, keywords, and pages is good for Google and good for you! "

I am pretty sure you can, but I'd double check to make sure.


No. And your actual PR doesn't have much to do with your SERP rankings (PR0 pages can outrank PR3, etc). You get higher rankings primarily by having solid content and people linking to you (a PR3 link is almost always better than a PR0 link though).

A lot of people theorize that bounce rate plays a part in it, but Matt Cutts has said it doesn't IIRC.

Thanks. Yeah I'm not very SEO-savvy so I didn't know SERP and PageRank were different.

SERP = search engine results page. So basically just where you show up on it.

PR = Page Rank which is a number assigned by Google to rank the actual page.

It's just semantics.

Ok, So I'm just gonna write where I'm at and if somebody with experience or preferably that used the TKA program to comment.

Basically they said to use KeywordDominatorTool as a way to find your keywords. It is temporarily down, so I just used GAKT, basically what I found is that with the KDT you are looking to narrow your search down to 100 keywords that get between 400-1000 searches per month (start small they say), and then your access keywords that have less than 400 words are going to be spread out throughtout your site in a fashion that is helpful (not just thrown in)

So what I did, Is used GAKT and downloaded a list of words from 1,500 searches to 400 searches per month. From there Im going to sort out keywords that are similar and just reworded and ones that dont fit my topic. That hopefully narrows me down to 100-150 words. I am then going to download the list of words that have less than 400 searches per month and use those periodically.

Baisically thats what I got your suppose to do with KTD, KTD just does it for you instead of manually.

Is there a problem with the way I did it? Should i wait for KTD to pop back up?

Also Im going to be packing this thread with questions, if thats inappropriate mods please tell me now.