Choosing content/focus for new fantasy site

[Duilen]

Originally Posted by James Trotta

That is a cool name but I don't see a lot of search engine value. Sure someone searching for scimitars might stumble upon my site, but that's hardly going to make or break my site. Basically I see having cool names as good writing, not SEO.

Scimitar isn't the only word tossed into that name. Heron is a name of a marking used on swords in the WOT series. "The Raven" is obviously a poem by Edgar Allen Poe. Then you have a few describing words tossed in for people who might be searching for things like. "Black Scimitar", "Gilded Scimitar" and "Gilden Heron".

I'm not suggesting you do keyword research to find terms that will yield the most possible searches. I simply think you would do well to incorporate detailed terms rather than abstract terms.

The part about you pulling SE traffic from backlinks without content is bogus. You will get referral traffic with only backlinks which is nice but thats about it. Obviously there are examples of pages that rank high for terms they aren't optimized for through SE spam but that is a technique I would not even begin to consider.

[James Trotta]

Originally Posted by Duilen

I'm not suggesting you do keyword research to find terms that will yield the most possible searches. I simply think you would do well to incorporate detailed terms rather than abstract terms.

I agree from an entertainment perspective, but I honestly don't care if someone searching for an Edgar Allen Poe poem finds my site in their search results. Not that they would anyway without the right links.

Originally Posted by Duilen

The part about you pulling SE traffic from backlinks without content is bogus. You will get referral traffic with only backlinks which is nice but thats about it. Obviously there are examples of pages that rank high for terms they aren't optimized for through SE spam but that is a technique I would not even begin to consider.

I'm sure you know the famous example of monster.com ranking #1 for job even though they don't use the word in the content. It has nothing to do with spam and everything to do with links.

Anyway, not much point in arguing about it here and now since we'll soon see. In a year or so we'll see how I'm doing in the search engines with "unoptimized" content.