I’ve certainly read discussions about chasing common misspellings and taking into account regional variances like optimisation vs optimization.

It sucks when one search engine has so much power, or should I say it sucks when so many people come online to compete with you that you can’t simply be “out there” and get easy traffic from the search engine.

It does however raise a conundrum, and possibly answers a nagging issue in my own mind – that is of spelling mistakes. I have a site that is optimised for a misspelling of a particular word. I did this because 32% of the population spells it this way and I was happy to have them as my customers.

So, does this new spelling aspect destroy this niching strategy? It could be, looking at stats over the past 18 months and resulting business.

However what I liked about the article and why I mentioned it was because it talked about content being the number one factor to worry about, that it has to be good content AND quantified particular things that are present in good content.

For someone running a home based solo Internet business that is handling all the SEO themselves and may not have time or motivation to study the intricacies of SEO or the funds to pay someone to handle it for them, focusing on generating good content is the one thing that is easy to do, is non-technical and will be effective over time. You keep writing interesting stuff that other humans are interested in.

The nature of SEO is very ambiguous because you have to at times guess what Google likes and dislikes and still the results can be completely random. Sometimes all you can do is scratch your head and wonder how that happened.

If you write a good article and lots of people link to it and read it there is a clear reason why that worked – you appealed to humans, not search engines, which in the end will appeal to search engines anyway since search engines are meant to find the best human answers to human questions.

A question for you Ed – if someone only had time to work on one aspect of SEO – what would you recommend they focus on for the best results?

OK the most obvious one is he does not address inbound links at all, and that is by far the most important SEO factor for any given website. Also a lot of this info is provided without context – for example the site ranked number one with a page rank of zero – how competitive was that keyword? That makes a huge difference.(also ignoring the fact that the pr displayed in the toolbar is not neccessarily an accurate indicator).

I guess the most annoying thing about this article is the obviousness of its major premise. Of course good content is the major factor in determining google rank – they’ve been quite explicit about that from the start.

It just annoys me when people are seemingly trying to make out that typical SEO activities are a waste of time – in my mind there is copious evidence that they aren’t (the rankings for our website being the most obvious). While it isn’t the most predictable or easy of marketing activities, if done in the right way it is more than worthwhile.