Jimmy asked:

1. Would you say its better to have your domain name relevant to the sites content or actual highly searched for keyword that will be optimized on the site?
2. Content –Do you recommend hiring someone to write content if we cant do on our own? how exactly does this work?
3. I’ve been told that a high CPC value is important on those highly searched for keywords that your optimizing. What exactly does that mean? How does it work as far as making money?

Dumbed down answers please! Thanks Jimmy

My reply:

Hi, Jimmy

 …

Visitor J.A. says:

I’m interested in some SEO consulting from you.

My dream words are ‘email lists’

I’m on page 4 now, what will it take — backlinking?

Hi, J.A. -

There are only 37 mentions of your site that Google knows about. That’s a pretty small number.

If you run this search for backlinks on my site www.wordsinarow.com, it will find about 1010 such links. It’s one reason my optin email lists page does so well in a search at Google, where it is has been #1 for about 3 years now in a …

Question: Blunt question that you can hopefully answer very briefly: Is website optimization still productive? I heard from one of my partners’ website designers that you’re not supposed to put in keywords any more because the current browsers like Google use spiders that only look at actual content rather than a list of keywords. If that is the case, are there still other things you can do besides paying for it, to get good placement? Don’t tell me what, just tell me IF this is still a valuable service! Or is that not strictly true?

Answer: Yes, optimization is still …

I received this question from a friend today about directory registrations and their worth or lack of it:

QuestionHi Jere

… I just wonder whether you can give me any advice on this. I am looking at a quick way to get some of my sites listed in on-line directories to increase incoming links and I wonder whether you use any tools for doing this…

Basically I have looked at a few tools but in the end there still seems to be a substantial amount of manual inputting involved – so I’m not sure if there is any great benefit …

Question from Todd: Will keywords in the table summary help boost rankings? An analysis of one competitor’s code suggests that it is helping them boost SEP.

Answer: You know, that’s a good question. For several years I routinely put in a table summary tag and put the keywords for the page in it — and it didn’t seem to make much difference. It didn’t hurt, either.

So it’s optional. Let me know if you have any success using it.

If you’re going to use tables, however, then I recommend you also use the “table trick” described here: …

Question:

Thanks so much for your prompt reply. I will input keywords for the PDF files.

I do have one last question: …. I read on your site and came across you saying that it’s better to have phrases than singular words for the keywords.

This seems to contradict what I have been reading about keywords on other sites. There was no mention about phrases being more effective. And when I check my competitors’ sites which rank high on Google search results, I noticed that they all use singular words.

So I am now a bit confused …

Question: Hi, do any of the search engines search PDF files? Reason for asking is that the Adobe Acrobat has a Keywords field under the function Document Properties. So I’m just wondering if these keywords would be searchable by search engines? Else, I won’t waste time populating my PDF files with keywords! Thanks for your advice. I really like your site. It’s easy to understand and very useful for newbies like me. I used your html validators to clean up my html files.

Answer: Thanks for your kind words about our website.

The search engines (especially Google) are …