Tales From Topographic Marketing

What do you do when you need traffic from a search engine? You look at what people are searching for. These search items, or queries as the search engines call them, are called "keywords" by Internet marketers. The keywords that people use to find your website are supposed to be related to whatever you have published there.

Say, for example, that you write several articles about how to take care of dogs. It's reasonable to assume that a search engine might show your pages to people who are looking for information about how to take care of dogs. But you might make incidental reference to unelated topics, such as mentioning the name of a store where you buy dog food.

Buying dog food is important to the care of dogs but the store where you buy your dog food may not be so important. Maybe people can buy the dog food at many different stores. So it might surprise you to learn that search engines may show your dog care articles to people searching for stores.

There are companies like the Bruce Clay SEO agency and the Alchemy Viral SEO agency that will help you "map" your keywords. These companies look at what your site is about and then search for appropriate keywords that searchers use to find content like yours. They match those keywords to the pages on your site and advise you on how to update your pages or to add more pages to match the keywords better.

This is a basic SEO practice and it is a pretty good one. But then there are companies that just plaster the web with thousands or millions of pages in the hope of being found for all sorts of keywords. This practice became so common and was so bad for search engines that Google created a special algorithm to handle all that extra content. They called the algorithm "Panda" and it has changed the way many marketers do business.

Now, instead of just producing articles for every keyword imaginable, marketers are trying to improve the quality of their sites and their content so that the search engines will send them more traffic. The Panda algorithm is like a policeman watching over the web, making sure people only put their best foot forward.

Some people question if Google should have done this at all. After all, shouldn't market economics handle poor quality web pages? In theory that is exactly what would happen. Searchers would become dissatisfied with the results Google was showing them and therefore start using another search engine like Microsoft's Bing or the upstart search engine Blekko. So market economics was not threatening just the lazy marketers but also Google itself.

Now, just as Google divided the web into "good sites" and "bad sites" marketers are dividing keywords into "good queries" and "bad queries". It's no longer a good idea to try to be found in all queries. It's better to just be found in the queries that are most relevant to your website. Maybe this will prove to be a better marketing experience for all of us.

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