Say you have a mediocre page sitting somewhere on your server and you really wish it could get more traffic. Here’s a cool [but non-traditional] solution on how you could achieve this goal.
10-second SEO introduction: A search engine learns about your page by crawling it and figuring out how to describe it. It’s basically a way of coming up with a 3-4 word summary of your page. This page, for example, should rank pretty highly for this search query.
10-second Genetic Algorithm introduction: http://www.wreck.devisland.net/ga/
People want to optimize their webpage page for given keywords. If you sell iPod music ripping software, you want to rank pretty highly for the terms “ipod music copy”, “iPod Rip”, “iPodRip”, etc..
But the question is — which words do you want to most focus on? Maybe the keywords “ipod music copy” is 10 times more popular than the term “iPod Rip”. That means that having “ipod music copy” will bring in 10 times more traffic than having “iPod Rip” in your <title> block. It’s impossible that all search keywords have the same volume but you can only have so many words in your <title> block before you start to look like a 1999 web IPO.
One of the most basic ways of optimizing a page to get more traffic is by mofidying the <title> block of your page. One way I could improve my SEO ranking would be to put the words “ipod music copy” into my <title> block — this would rank my site higher in google’s search rankings.
Step 1. Tracking.
You’ll want to get some code on the page that measures traffic on your page. Just something that can keep track of how many visitors have been to your site. You could do this with some simple PHP and MySQL.
Step 2. Seed Algorithm
Come up with a couple of words you want to try. Maybe a set of 100 different keywords that you’d like to test for. Out of these words, you want to find out which are significnat and which are not.
Step 3. Run
Now. Every 3 days*, have your algorithm look at the combinations of words used in the <title> block and see how much traffic came in. You’ll probably want to do some t-testing to make sure that changes in traffic are due to actual changes in your <title> block, and not random noise from traffic. The fitness function of the genetic algorithm is simply how much traffic the page received. If the title block was a bad combination of words, the fitness function would see that there isn’t much traffic coming in and would have the page use a different combination of words.
Step 4. Modify
After leaving this running for maybe 15-20 days, you should have a clearer picture of which keywords bring in the most traffic and which should be used. Everytime the algorithm finds a word that brings in more traffic, use it. Then test combinations. There are a lot of possibilities here. Go back to step 3.
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You can only improve traffic by so much by modifying the <title> block of your page. This could easily be expanded to modifying page configuration and layout. Genetic algorithms are really good at playing with things until they work.
*From my experience, google crawls my sites every 3 days. You you want step 3 to happen every time google crawls your site, so say your site is crawled every 7 days, make your time period 7 days instead of 3. That way, you get all of the traffic from the given keywords.