You’re Here – Awesome! – It’s time for an experiment.
There is no greater opportunity available to SEO’s than the ability to use search engines to perform experiments and test theories. It is through this painstaking process that knowledge about the functions of the engines is learned.
Let’s try a test and see what happens…
- Register a new website with nonsense keywords (e.g. catdogisawesome.com)
- Create multiple pages on that website, all targeting a similarly ludicrous term (e.g. catdogisawesome)
- Test the use of different placement of text, formatting, use of keywords, link structures, etc by making the pages as uniform as possible with only a singular difference
- Point links at the domain from indexed, well-spidered pages on other domains
- Record the search engines’ activities and the rankings of the pages
- Make small alterations to the identically targeting pages to determine what factors might push a result up or down against its peers
- Record any results that appear to be effective and re-test on other domains or with other terms – if several tests consistently return the same results, chances are you’ve discovered a pattern that is used by the search engines.