I had the great pleasure and privilege of speaking at Search Engine Strategies 2008 in San Jose. The topic? Net neutrality. This is the point where your eyes glaze over and the inevitable question, “What is net neutrality?” comes forth. And that’s the point of this article.

The session had very low turnout and Kevin Ryan, the organizer of SES, was there asking to all, “What could we do to increase awareness and attendance?” The issue is important to Kevin, important to me and in fact – it’s important to anyone who makes their living on or uses the Internet.

The quest for higher search engine positioning on the natural search engines is generally the quest to increase revenue from a product or service. It is not the rankings themselves that hold any special value; it is the visitors that they bring and the resulting increase in business. It is for this reason that the PPC engines and namely the secondary ones are a great tool in developing a campaign strategy for the natural engines that will produce the highest return on investment.

The quest for higher search engine positioning on the natural search engines is generally the quest to increase revenue from a product or service. It is not the rankings themselves that hold any special value; it is the visitors that they bring and the resulting increase in business. It is for this reason that the PPC engines and namely the secondary ones are a great tool in developing a campaign strategy for the natural engines that will produce the highest return on investment.

While tools such as the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool and WordTracker are great tools for helping to determine which phrases are most searched, they cannot provide you with which phrases will produce the highest return on investment and let's be honest, search engine positioning is not about traffic it's about money. While traffic can often mean money, knowing which search phrases are going to lead to the highest conversion rates will give you a great advantage going into your SEO campaign.

Many metaphors have been offered up to describe or explain the Internet, but calling it “an ocean of words” is as accurate as any other. In 1998 the first Google index counted 26 million pages, by 2000 it had reached the billion mark and by 2002 it had more than tripled again to over 3 billion. In July 2008 the company’s Web Search Infrastructure Team announced that it had counted 1 trillion unique URLs on the web at once. At an average 1000 words per page, that means the web contains an astonishing 1 quadrillion words. That’s 15 zero’s.

Obviously, writing for publication on the Internet and standing out from all the rest of the verbiage presents a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Yet web professionals know from the ever-improving metrics and analytics that certain articles and specific kinds of writing do, in fact, perform better at their assigned tasks.

And make no mistake – writing for publication means setting (and hitting) targets, not crafting a follow-up to The Great Gatsby or concocting clever rhymes. In fact, fiction and poetry together account for only some 15% of web writing, which means the overwhelming majority of articles in cyberspace are non-fiction, imparting knowledge to educate the world.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writing, as a distinct style, was born in the Internet era and has matured before our very eyes in a relatively short span of time. Although it is evolving and maturing still, and will continuously do so, we can define some of the tried and tested steps of content optimization to help unique pages place at or near the top of search engine rankings.

Some experts go on to say that the goal of SEO is two-fold, with the first objective to put out the appropriate "bait" for search engine spiders and the second to serve up useful information to people who want and need it. Debates about priorities continue among SEO professionals, but it is never a good idea to devalue the human factors in any success formula. The singular goal, then, would be to develop, position and refine content in such a way as to satisfy all visitors to the page and/or site, both human and bot alike.

Our exploration of utilizing content to increase conversion rates began with analyzing statistics to uncover opportunities for improvement, followed by how to create and implement good content to compel visitors to take action. The natural next step is testing.

Unless you do some sort of controlled, measurable testing, you will never know what changes in copy, titles, calls to action, color schemes, layouts, etc. increase your conversion the best. Simply put, you should test variations of your content elements in different combinations to see what achieves the highest conversion overall.

It may be helpful to picture the structure of journalism, the formula for writing a news story – “who, what, when, where, how and why.” When you are testing new content elements, defining and controlling for the first four W’s (and the H) just might offer you the answer to the last one – “why” your changes get the results they do.