I don’t normally look at the type of search phrases that bring people to Surface Languages but this morning (as it is the first of the month) I had a look.

So, I had a look at some of the searches used,and one was ‘free language learning’.

Naturally, I typed this into Google to see where Surface Languages ranked. Somewhere on the first page is the answer, with the BBC languages being firmly in pole position.

It also revealed articles written for SEO or link purposes only. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation the gist of which is to try and increase the number of visitors to a website through various means.

One is to increase the number of other sites that link into your site. This moves the site up the rankings for relevant searches within the search engines and so increases the number of visitors to your site.

So, for example, if Surface Languages had 5000 links (I wish) and you typed in ‘language learning‘ there would be a strong possibility that it would rank first.  As it doesn’t, you won’t find this website using that key phrase. I doubt whether it is within the first 30 pages!

The downside of this is that many, many articles are written solely for the purpose of gaining links, either for the authors site or perhaps a a website they are being paid to promote.

You can spot these articles easily. They contain generalisations, cliches, no useful research, no useful information and can be written extremely fast.

Unfortunately, if they are on pages that are themselves on *authority* sites (maybe like some of the big newspapers), they will rank extremely highly for the targeted phrases.

The internet is increasingly cluttered with these *informative articles*,  so when you are genuinely looking for information, you have to sift through articles written solely with the idea of SEO and not intending to inform.

Look for titles such as The ten easiest languages to learn if you want to example of  articles like this.

I don’t particularly advise this.

The other way of increasingly a websites popularity, is too make a it sufficiently useful that people want to use it and to tell their friends:).

This is what I’m attempting to do here.

Peace,

MF