gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

Um, wasn't it Moses who parted the Red Sea?

Depends who you ask.

"And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. " -King James Bible

While you're right about the fundamental necessity of "Googlejuice" for most online businesses, as a professional search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) consultant + software developer I'm afraid your basic take's a bit simplistic.

So Google's the #1 kid on the block, true. This means they're attracting the lion's share of search traffic - including, alas, all the tirekickers and windowshoppers. And experience shows that mere quantitiy does not by necessity convert into quality (aka sales conversions) here.

From an ROI point of view, with a lot of our clients less traffic from MSN or Yahoo! may still result in a much higher turnover in absolute terms than double or tripple the "junk traffic" from Google.

The demographics are quite unclear, the search engines probably being the only major advertising medium extant not offering their clients hard, verifiable data in this field. While you can target keywords and search phrases fairly easily via pay-per-click models, there's no way you can target, say, 40 to 50 year old male business executives in the $200 K yearly income range, single moms spending an average of $45 a month on cosmetics or juvenile baseball fans with their own PCs and MP3 players, to take but three examples.

Not that they don't have a lot of such data readily available - after all, they're the world's greatest data mining corporations and have been so for years. However, they are also quite secretive about, the advertiser marketing accepting their approach with a shrug just like the bunch of docile sheep they are.

Finally, yes, your assertion that frequent blogging will help your Google rankings rise is fundamentally correct, but unfortunately there's absolutely no reliability whatsoever in this assumption.

Google alone is estimated to take some 120+ factors into consideration when determining rankings, and frequently updated (blogged) content is just one of them. (The other search engines' ranking algorithms are similarly complex.)

There's a reason, after all, why a whole full blown industry of SEO/SEM companies is thriving on this situation (as are we, I will gladly confess): search engine optimization is a veritable craft in its own right, requiring the full gamut of expertise, experience and relentlessly focused, concentrated effort. It can also be quite expensive.

Don't want to spoil the party - you've got an excellent blog plus very good linkage and sure deserve all the high rankings you can get.

But if you're really serious about "Googlejuicing", I'd recommend seeking some professional advice and support. Rankings are pretty volatile animals and we've seen more than one company going from top to flop at the turn of a moment with nobody around in house to grasp what actually happened and why, least of all what to do about it.

Being subject to the search engines' whimsy, as most commercial web sites are, is not a business plan, it's entrepreneurial suicide, period. Nor is it a god given, because there's actually quite a lot you can do about it effectively to level the playing field. And beat your competitors to it.

As Humpty Dumpty said: "It's a question of who is to be master, that's all."

Wow. He explained the shit right outta that one, hey? As far as blogging goes, page rank is much easier than that: it's all about incoming links. links. links.

...which is all about content and marketing. Right up your alley.

I tried like mad to think up some much bigger words to use, but alas. It was not to be.

I reckon this is a good opportunity to add that your advice's validity goes far beyond marketing. This small fish knows nothing about advertising, but reads you everyday. The Hughtrain stops just about everywhere.

1) Ignore 'PageRank' - don't buy the hype. And it is not just quantity, quality is also important as is anchor text (try ranking for 'savile row tailor' with everyone just linking using the url)
2) Yes, links are v. important and content is a good way of getting links but not something unique to blogs. "Link to me for a free suit" might also get you a fair amount of links ;O)
3) "Blogs are far easier to update than conventional websites."? Eh? What sort of crappy web sites have you been inflicted with? Um, web sites have easy to use CMS systems nowadays unless you are stuck in 1994 'conventions' ..

That aside, keep up the good work :O)

Yeah, your Google-fu is getting stronger. I was #1 for 'thomas mahon' for several weeks, but have steadily dropped to #4 as your, and Thomas's, Google-fu has increased. Of course, this is how it should be!

The important things are incoming links and titles. I'm on the second page for 'RSS' (just the single word) due to some 2000 incoming links mostly containing 'RSS'. The more links EnglishCut gets that have the word 'tailor' in them, the better! Chris, above, is right.. link text matters. Links are great even on their own, however, in lieu of anything else.

And then, yeah, titles and headings. EnglishCut is not bad in this regard actually, although I'd probably shuffle more into the H1 and style around it.. The H1 only contains "English Cut" which isn't much help. You need to get the word "tailor" and "bespoke" in there somehow. If you search for "english tailor", the mighty power of the "English" works out for Tom, as he is #5, and you are #1.

Also, try not to search using quotes, except for diagnosing. Almost no visitor who matters will be using them. The fact that you (gapingvoid) are #1 on 'english tailor' and 'bespoke english tailor' (no quotes) is a great start. Now start to focus on a strategy for hitting the top on 'london tailor', 'paris tailor', 'london custom suits', 'london bespoke suits' and so forth. One way to do this is through individual blog posts. This is how, for example, I am currently #2 (was #1 for months though) for 'cillit bang', the cleaning product.

Make sure you get the H1s and H2s right on individual posts, then be clever with titles. I'm sure you can make a post called 'London custom-made suits' and still make it seem non-spammy. Then you start getting the #1s with a blog on the terms that matter ;-)

Yep - and if this goes on, you'll be search engine optimizing 99% of the time and writing/drawing blog stuff 1%. Is that what you want?

Don't get me wrong, whitey, Chris, Peter - all of your advice is, to varying degrees, quite sound and obviously well intended.

But that's exactly where either professionalism or the art of delegating tasks to competent agents come into play.

Think of the inhibitions you'll have to impose on the creative angle otherwise. To construe an intentionally bizarre example just to drive the point home: suppose you wanted to be found in a graphical search engine with your cartoons and people were to advise you a la "no vertical lines, please, XYZ engine doesn't like them", "not more than two characters - else it'll look spammy", "do them in colors, pushed mine right to the top", yadda yadda, you get the drift.

At the end of the day you'd be where you once started: stifled in following any which rules established by others, having to "do it right" or starve, etc. Again: Is that what you want?