Jill,

Great newsletter. Always a lot of great information.

A lot of questions I see for search engine rankings are extremely valuable for those sites that have a product or service to sell. What about sites like mine that are purely content? Our content is dynamic and refreshes daily. We don't sell anything on our site. All revenue is derived from advertising.

How valuable is an SEO campaign when every day our content changes and keywords gain and lose value in a matter of days?

John G.

Hi John,

Glad you like the newsletter.

Regarding your site, it's difficult to give you a good answer without actually knowing what your site is all about. However, I can tell you that for search engine purposes, you would definitely want/need some static content. Even though your site is informational and changes all the time, there must be some central theme, right?

For instance, a news site may have ever-changing news articles, but the basic theme of the site is that it provides a constant supply of up-to-date news (on a given subject, or just generally). If this were your type of site, you'd then want to do some keyword research on how people might search for news. Maybe people type in "current events" or "recent news" or "news about _____" or whatever. This is where your keyword research is so very important and comes in handy. You may find that people search in ways you never imagined.

What about archived articles? Do you have any of those on your site? If so, you'll have built-in static content right there. You don't necessarily have to "optimize" your articles, but simply do some rudimentary optimization that ensures a proper Title tag describing the content within the article. You'd be surprised how many people find sites because certain keyword phrases they were searching for appeared in an article.

The same is true for archived newsletters. When I write this newsletter, I definitely don't write it with keyword phrases in mind -- the way I would if I were specifically optimizing certain pages of a site. However, people searching for some of the various topics I write about find the archived newsletters naturally. In fact, Google's goal is to make sure they index sites in this natural way. They would actually prefer it if nobody optimized their sites for particular keywords. (Doesn't mean we should throw all optimization out the door, however!)

So what's your basic theme? Figure it out, do your keyword research and create static pages (or use your current archived material) which will let the world know exactly what your site is all about and why they would want to come to it. It's rare that search engine optimization *can't* benefit a site at least a little bit. It may not be the be-all-end-all for every site, but the search engines are the first places most people go to find information. The great part is that informational sites are generally the highest ranked in Google. You'll notice that they seem to favor them over commercial sites nearly every time!