Thoughts on a mission statement and SEO.. please read !

[jr20044763]

I was wondering, i am restructuring a lot of my content on my site, to make it Search engine friendly. By and large, it is a free information site that aims at delivering high quality advice within personal development but other fields such as career advancement (where does personal development stop i suppose) - My experience and help i believe can help people of all ages, however i believe the newly graduated twenty-something, will benefit mostly from what i have to offer.

Do you think i should narrow down the mission statement of the site to be primarily for twenty-somethings? or make it very open? i am thinking of SEO also, more defined searches yield better results, but in this particular case am i sabbotaging my own market?

Any thoughts would be appreciated..

Take care.

[Curtis2011]

I have a feeling that your mission statement has very little to do with your rankings in the search engines.


The main things that determine how high a page ranks for a keyword:

1. The keyword needs to be in the <h1> and <title> tags on the page.
2. It needs to appear in the short <meta name="description" content="Blah blah keyword blah">
3. It needs to appear in the content on the page at least a few times.

Aside from that, other things that help your pages rank higher:

1. Total site authority from inbound links. The more inbound links, especially ones containing your keyword, the higher your website will rank as a whole.
2. The more pages your website has that are related to a similar topic, the higher every page will rank. In general, the same exact page on a 100-page website will rank higher than if the page appeared on 30-page website. This is something I have noticed a LOT with SBI websites.

As far as focusing your niche, as long as your pages are in "bundles" of inter-linked, related content, your pages will rank fine. What I mean is that a page about "career advancement" will rank higher if it is linked to 5 related pages, rather than if it appears as a standalone page on your website. Of course, if your entire website is devoted to this one topic, then it will help each page rank higher.

One final note:
1. Always write original content. If you copy content from other sources, Google will not rank your copy of the content anywhere where anyone will ever find it.

[jr20044763]

Much appreciated.

I am struggling slightly as, i need key words that are searched reguarly by google users, but that when searched doesnt bring up more than say, 1 million results - but in the case of personal development i think anything below three million is OK.

With the mission statement, my main concern there, is i feel that if i am specific with my aim, as much personal dev literature advocates it will improve my end result, not bringing vague results, as reflective of my mission statement, if that makes sense.

Unfortunately i am trying to tap into the market which is possibly over saturated, but il take faith from the fact that 90% (?) of all triers quit before the end of 6 months - im about 6 months now, and invigorated, but have not truthfully been 'serious' for very long.

Again, really appreciate the help.

[ginkgo]

Sorry I do not see a link to your site so we can see your mission statement. Is that because the info on your site is CLASSIFIED? If you want your website to be an age discriminating site, then you can say that in your mission statement. Keywords can be put anywhere in your site.

Some sites will even say TAGS and then just put in all of these keywords. I have not done it since I am concerned that Google may consider it unethical (black hat) since it is not for the people but for the search engines.