Most common permaculture/homesteading problems and questions

I'd like to do some work with longtail keywords at some point, to really get this site moving up the Google search results. Paul and I were chatting today, and the more specific of a question that we can answer, the more likely our page is to pop up near the top of the results. So that being said, I'm sure I'm not the only one that types full on ridiculous questions into Google - what are some questions you think people are Googling that tie into permaculture?

Think of common problems, issues, questions, etc. that you hear from people regarding all things permaculture, gardening, homesteading, natural living, etc., and post them here. Let's get this idea train rolling, and spread the reach of this bountiful empire!

I think long tail searches will take care of themselves. I was explaining that we do well with long tail searches because I keep the pages here long.

Our SEO expert, Rick... who we should add to this forum... thinks that we should make each page thread shorter and then have more pages - mostly to get that earlier click that tells Google that the person found a page they like.

I think it's not a bad idea to make threads or wiki pages for short tail or medium tail searches. Probably even smarter is to come up with pages that we already have that should do well and then find ways to polish them so they could do even better.

A page that means a long tail search might get 3 views per month. It isn't worth the effort to make more specifically for a long tail search. But rather to better facilitate our community so more threads are created and they just happened to fill long tail searches.

Matt Cutts, the guy at Google that gives SEO advice, says that the best thing that you can do for SEO is to make a good user experience. I really like that approach. The more we grow our community organically, the better all of our SEO will be.

paul wheaton wrote:I think long tail searches will take care of themselves. I was explaining that we do well with long tail searches because I keep the pages here long.

Our SEO expert, Rick... who we should add to this forum... thinks that we should make each page thread shorter and then have more pages - mostly to get that earlier click that tells Google that the person found a page they like.

Ohh I see what you're saying there - I think I was just up late working and overthinking it then. I've been using SEO tools so much with my other job, sometimes I forget you can in fact just have an active community with great content, and rank higher that way And even better, it's not just marketing then.

The shorter page idea was to reduce the bounce rates. Google and the rest of the engines are using engagement stats (bounce, # of pages, duration, etc.) as an indicator of page quality. That quality score is one of the ingredients in their ranking algorithm. Some would argue that quality is more important today than pagerank (link score). Quality score is hard to spam or buy, but pagerank is pretty easy to manipulate.

This ties directly into the Cutts comment about making a site that visitors like. Google has given away Analytics, and most sites have installed it, so they now have the data to easily compare engagement stats for different websites. I am not saying they necessarily use that data, but it is an option...

Since the permies forum is dynamic, we are working on some tweaks that will be made to code in templates, and viola, all the pages in the site/forum should be friendlier to the search engines. That should be a bump to the long-tail rankings.

I am a big believer in optimizing a navigation structure through a site for both SEO and usability. For example, "permaculture" is not a main forum category, even though one could argue that is the central theme for the website.

Also consider things like "growies" might be more friendly to search engines as "better-than-organic gardening" and "critters" might be better served as "chickens, ducks, goats, and other critters."

By working those words into your navigation structure, every page in the site gets a boost for that added relevant content that reappears on every page. If you really want to rank for a keyword, you put it into your navigation and repeat that navigation on all pages.