Does anyone know what an eigenvector is?  If not, I think I have found a great paying job for all the unemployed and underemployed mathematicians out there (even as a night job for all those working as university professors):  SEO consulatants.  Most SEO consulatant have lots to say and little to back it up with.  For a refreshing (if mind-boggling) contrast, check out this article of the month on the American Mathematicians Society web site.

The aforementioned eigenvector (plus stochastics, and other fun math terms) are all set forth brilliantly by this article's author, David Austin of Grand Valley State University (100 ActiveRain points to the first guy that tells me where Grand Valley State University is that doesn't look it up on the internet before answering).  I had just about solved for "S" in the formula above as it related to our website Angelic-RE.com when I crashed my computer by loading in too big a formula.  I guess one needs a Cray 2 or similarly large bank of servers...like Google of course has. 

Nonetheless I haven't given up hope on SEO.  angel and I checked Google and MSN the other day and for several different search strings (including my name, plus a few key strings for our market) we ended up in several of the top five spots, even all five I think on one of them, four out of five on some others.  Funny, since our sites (AngelicRealEstate.com, Angelic-CRE.com and the previously noted Angelic-RE.com) ALL HAVE A PAGERANK OF ZERO?!  (note, to check pagerank, just get the Google toolbar or go here).  I've spent time in forums and reading blogs about this, from the top guys in the business like Matt Cutts of Google to some guy in a town of 263 people in northwest British Columbia that can't stop bragging about how (after nine months of setting up reciprocal links to every web site that will take him) he comes up #1 for the search string "Mooseville real estate".  Impressive...

Here's the little bit I've figured out, which really comes as no surprise to me:

1.  Good, fresh, relevant content, especially that contains your desired search string of words, beats all other SEO strategies I've heard of hands down.  By the way, for those that spend all their time trying to enhance their web visibility, with nothing behind it, that same relevant content might actually give a potential client a reason to call you, instead of just clicking the back button on their browser to find a site with relevance to them.  Yes, it really is all about content.  Go figure.

2.  Give up on the reciprocal link thing.  An SEO executive that touts it even admits "it's pure drudgery" - and that's from a company that does it all day long to website after website.  Think about it this way, you can spend all your time creating reciprocal links to nowhere to get more incoming links to your site, or you can just spend half the time (and little if any of the money) creating content that other people will link to (called "link bait" by the SEO types).  Besides, when people do find your site...refer back to #1.

3.  Blog, blog, blog.  Nothing creates link bait and good relevant content faster and more frequently then blogging about relevant issues to your target clientele.  Make sure to intentionally drop your favorite relevant search strings into the text (but creatively, so they aren't out of place).  This makes the search engine robots and spiders that read and re-read your site day after day think that must be what your site is really all about.  Don't forget to register your blog at places like Technorati, Pingoat, Digg, Reddit and others (I haven't done this yet, but plan on it...when I can break away from blogging long enough to do it).  Thanks Barrett Niehus for the recent blog that mentioned some of those.  To check how relevant your search string is, go to anywhere Overture's keyword tool is and it will tell you how many people searched a particular string in the past month.

4.  Now link to your own blog and site in other blogs you have (like on AR) or when commenting on the blogs of others (note: don't spam people's blogs with garbage responses just to link back to yourself).  This creates just as many inbound links to your site as the reciprocal linking does, and it does so in a relevant way, to specific parts of the site, something I guess the search engines like (meaning don't just link to your homepage over and over - link to your blogs).  Enoch's blog and his photo album on our site have an enterntainment and consumer focus, whereas this AR blog is about industry stuff, but there's reasons to tie them together from time to time, to the SEO benefit of both.  If you want to see how many inbound links there are to your site out there in cyberspace, go here.

There you have it.  A whopping two months of learning in three minutes.  How does that make me any kind of an expert? - it doesn't.  Neither are most of the others out their that call themselves SEO experts, though, and at least our sites are all showing up top five (multiple times) - how many SEO companies can say they are top five in the search string "SEO experts"?!  (the answer, of course, is only five - duh!)

What's most amazing is that my ActiveRain profile comes up first in each of our key search strings - BEFORE ANY OF OUR WEBSITES.  I guess maybe the simple thing to do is just keep blogging away on AR and forget the rest - obviously they have a few mathematicians of their own in the back working this out for all of us!