Secret Sauce & Choiceskills.com

There have been millions of articles about Google’s secret algorithm for ranking pages and prioritizing content to give to users.  This article is simply one more in a long line of people trying to figure out how to do it.

With so-called black-hat ranking tactics (spamming, cloaking, link farms, google bombs, etc.) becoming more taboo, there is more and more emphasis on the legitimate and accepted ways to get your pages to rank higher in Google’s search.

Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google and has apparently become the default liaison with the webmaster community.  He says that the best way to get your page rank up is to ignore your page rank and focus on your customers.  Figure out what your customers want and then create buzzworthy content, vital content, or something that provides a service or a resource to users.  Create the kind of content that users want to bookmark and your ranking will climb.

We’ve recently begun working on another project in the web analytics class.  A local businessman has written a few books about character education and teaching social skills to children.  He’s quite passionate about the subject and it’s absolute necessity and he’s created http://choiceskills.com to sell his products.  It’s a small business mostly receiving traffic from Google pay-per-click campaigns, and in it’s own little way, it’s profitable.

Until recently.  His web host provider went out of business and he was forced to move over to a new host.  In the process of doing that, some links broke, and there were some other issues, but suddenly all orders came to a grinding halt.

The web analytics class is now responsible for reviving the site, growing revenues, and making this into a viable business.  I’m actually really excited about this.  So with these thoughts floating around in my head, I’ve started to do some thinking.

The first thing to do is figure out what markets these books appeal to.  I believe we were told that the bulk of sales that used to occur were from school districts, but doesn’t this seem like the kind of content that would be suitable for parents to teach their children as well?

What kinds of searches does our local businessman want to end up at his site?  Which keywords is he buying?  If he wants to drive more traffic, how can he use the secret sauce to create a buzz?  Would creating a blog about the major topic of the site help bring traffic?  I know that Google brings a lot of traffic to my blog, and while I have looked at some of the results, I haven’t taken any special measures to climb the ranks.

Choiceskills is a static site right now, and doesn’t show up anywhere in the top ranks of searches that I thought were relevant.  A static site isn’t going to be moving anywhere quickly.  Maybe something dynamic could help bring people in.

In addition, perhaps he could partner with some of the sites that do show up at the top of relevant searches.  Googling “character development” brings up all sorts of sites that look  like they’d be willing to provide links to drive traffic.

One final thing to wrap up my initial thoughts that I don’t want to come off wrong.  I know this is a legitimate business because I’ve talked to the owner about his plan and his business, but if I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t spend my money on the site.  It just doesn’t look like the kind of site that I would trust with my credit card number.  Perhaps giving the site a more professional, business-style template could help things out a bit.

In any case, I’m excited to get moving on this latest project and build this business.  Seriously, how often do you the opportunity to do fun things like this?