Friday, March 31, 2006

SEO Progress

I have a hierarchy of words that I aspire to place well on. Here, for instance, in the homeschool arena, is a progress report. I'm measuring my place in google on words pulled from Yahoo's data on the number of searches conducted on their engine in Feb 06:

home school -143,598 searches- 64th on google for homeschool, not in top 100 for home school
home school curriculum - 22,530 - 21st on google (for homeschool curriculum)
christian home school - 8,747
home school resource - 6,104 - 90th
online home school - 4,182 - 7th for homeschool online, 12th for online homeschool, not placing with home school spelling
home school program - 3,764 - 100th on google
home school worksheets - 3,385 - 67th on google
high school diploma at home - 2,752 - not interested
home school material - 2,449 - 55th on google for homeschool material
home school driver ed - 2,448 - not interested

I tend to focus on my results on google. As recently as Oct 2005, I was not in the top 100 for any of these terms. However, as last check, I was front page on google for one variation of online home school, under 100 on homeschool program homeschol resource, homeschool material, and homeschool resource. And had just broken the top 100 for homeschool.

What does "one variation mean?" Well, google treats these searches differently: online homeschool (I'm number 7 here today) , online home school (not in top 100), homeschool online (number 12), and home school online (not in top 100).

The different semantic handling of home school versus homeschool and the order is perplexing to me but not an area of great interest. I imagine google and yahoo have a number of rapidly evolving approaches to dealing with these semantic questions.

It's interesting how steady my progress has been over the past 6 months with my site creeping up on a weekly basis.

With more links and page tweeks, I would expect to get on the front page for almost of all these terms by the summer with the exception of homeschool itself.

To be honest, I'm not all that sure where all these links are coming from. I have placed some advertisments staying focused on text advertisements with direct searchable links where they let me choose the anchor text. For instance:

homeschool.com
Ann Zeiss' Cool Homeschooling Site

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