This is a page about arboreal anonymity. It’s obviously a made up topic. There’s no such thing. The phrase means absolutely nothing. I mean “arboreal” means something to do with trees. And “anonymity” means something about an unidentified person. So putting the two words together into “arboreal anonymity” makes no sense at all.

 

Why talk about arboreal anonymity?

The purpose of this page is to test if my website is being crawled correctly. I’ve got lots of pages on my site. Their on page optimisation is good. They have great content. They have images. They have downloads. And they have links to other internal pages and external sites. I’ve done everything I can from an on page optimisation point of view.

The off page optimisation still needs work but that will come with time.

These pages aren’t attracting the amount of traffic I would expect. But they are about topics that are heavily contested on the Internet. Topics around marketing. So I’m creating a page about a made up topic. There won’t be any competition for a page about arboreal anonymity. Nobody else has written a page about it. Nobody would.

 

What can we say about arboreal anonymity?

Well, obviously it’s a big problem for any wooded area. Just think of those lovely trees and saplings who aren’t sure about their identity. They don’t know who they are and, more to the point, nor does anybody else. When we look at a tree, we rarely know its name. How rude are we?

 

Is arboreal anonymity getting better or worse?

That’s a good question. On the whole, we’d have to say the situation is improving. There’s a good reason for this. We’re cutting down all the bloody trees. The woody maniacs should worry more about being alive next year than whether somebody knows their name or not. Get your priorities right, for God’s sake.

 

What else are we going to put on this page?

Obviously, we’ll need some pictures. Pictures of trees. Pictures of lots of trees that look the same. Pictures of trees that we have no idea what their name is. Poor old anonymous trees. But that’s just the crisis of arboreal anonymity. What can we do about it? Bugger all.

We probably ought to create a download as well. All we’ll do is export this document as a PDF and then create a download with the title “Arboreal Anonymity”.

 

My challenges

One challenge will be to discover if you can rank well for a page that nobody searches for. There won’t be any traffic for this keyword. So, even if the page is perfectly optimised, will it rank number one? In theory, yes. In practice, time will tell.

I’ve also got to write a lot more text. Google likes long pages. Current wisdom suggests that it considers a good page to be 2 to 3000 words long. I’ve only just gone over 450 words. What else can you say about arboreal anonymity?

 

International implications

I suppose we could say that the trees in the rainforest areas of the Amazon basin suffer from greater anonymity than any vegetation you might find in the Sahara desert. If you plonk a tree down in the middle of the Sahara, there’s no way it’s going to be anonymous. It will be the most famous tree in the world (apart from the apple tree that Adam and Eve found).

A tree in the middle of the rainforest is the exact opposite. Totally anonymous. I’m not even sure they have much variety of species in trees in a rainforest. All I ever see on TV is footage of the canopy from above. It all looks the same to me. 100% arboreal anonymity.

My one saving grace in producing this garbage about such a made up topic is that I don’t actually have to write it. Thanks to Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I’m just talking to my computer and it’s writing down every word of gibberish I say.

It’s actually a saving grace because it corrects my spelling as well. I was going to spell arboreal completely different. To me, it should be “arborial”. Luckily, Dragon knows differently. Imagine if I’d gone to great lengths to create a made up page about a topic and then spelt that topic wrong.

Mind you, that might not have made any difference. If it’s a made up topic, the spelling can be made up as well. But I’m probably safer using words that actually exist in the English language. Otherwise I might just be too far off the beaten track. Among the unknown trees, you might say. Arboreal anonymity at work in practice.

Still only 770 words.

I’m going to have to go and get a cup of coffee before I can write any more of this bullshit. I haven’t written this much rubbish since I was a journalist.

Okay, back again.

I started wondering if any decent poetry has been written about trees. It seems unlikely. I mean, who was it who wrote that poem about “wondering lonely as a cloud”? Was it Wordsworth? Anyway, whoever it was, he didn’t write about trees, did he? Whatever. It’ll be a good excuse for an external link from this page. That’ll help the rankings.

Bloody hell, it was Wordsworth. Years of private education weren’t a complete waste of money after all. Mother and father would be proud. If they weren’t already dead. Pushing up daisies. Or lonely trees.

Now I’ve reached 900 words. I’m going to make it to 1000, then publish the page.

I should find that the accuracy from Dragon NaturallySpeaking has just got an awful lot better. For some reason, the microphone is always at half volume when the computer starts. So all the dictation I do is too quiet for best accuracy. Now I’ve just increased the volume to 100% and, hey presto, everything gets an awful lot better. Not that it was bad to begin with.

 

How do we tackle arboreal anonymity?

If we are worried about trees not having names or not knowing their names (they’re not likely to speak, are they? Ents were a figment of Tolkien’s imagination), what should we do about it?

When I was researching commemorative metalwork (don’t ask), I found lots of organisations who sold little memorial plaques. These were only about 6 inches wide but they had a stake that you could put at the foot of a tree you planted in somebody’s memory.

If we gave a name to every tree, we could put a little name plaque at its foot so everybody would know that name. And if that idea isn’t stupid enough, just think of the sustainability angle. We’d have to chop down a load of trees to create the plaques that we use to name other trees. It’s almost cannibalism. I think we’d better live with arboreal anonymity for a little bit longer.

 

Its day has come

As you know, this is a test page to see if the site is being recognised.Well, it is. Of course it is. You just have to be more patient than I am. After 11 weeks, this page finally ranked Google #1 for “arboreal anonymity”. So if you also have a new website, and even if you’re competing for uncontested keywords like this made-up one, it can still take that long for Google to recognise you exist.