Understanding Search Engine Optimization
In This Chapter
Learning how search engines see websites
Taking a look at popularity in SEO
Considering the role of relevancy in SEO
At Google, search engineers talk about “80-20” problems. They are
describing situations where the last 20 percent of the problem is 80
percent of the work. Learning SEO is one of these problems. Eighty
percent of the knowledge SEOs need is available online for free.
Unfortunately, the remaining 20 percent takes the majority of the time and
energy to find and understand. My goal with this book is to solve this
problem by making the last 20 percent as easy to get as the first 80
percent. Though I don’t think I will be able to cover the entire 20 percent
(some of it comes from years of practice), I am going to write as much
actionable advanced material as humanly possible.
This book is for those who already know the basics of SEO and are
looking to take their skills to the next level. Before diving in, try reading the
following list:
robots.txt
sitemap
nofollow
301 redirect
canonicalization
I f you are not sure what any of the items in this list are, you should goover to the nearest computer and read the article “The Beginner’s Guide to
SEO” at
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-
optimization
This free article can teach you everything you need to know to use this
book to its fullest. Done with that? Great, now we can begin
Learning how search engines see websites
Taking a look at popularity in SEO
Considering the role of relevancy in SEO
At Google, search engineers talk about “80-20” problems. They are
describing situations where the last 20 percent of the problem is 80
percent of the work. Learning SEO is one of these problems. Eighty
percent of the knowledge SEOs need is available online for free.
Unfortunately, the remaining 20 percent takes the majority of the time and
energy to find and understand. My goal with this book is to solve this
problem by making the last 20 percent as easy to get as the first 80
percent. Though I don’t think I will be able to cover the entire 20 percent
(some of it comes from years of practice), I am going to write as much
actionable advanced material as humanly possible.
This book is for those who already know the basics of SEO and are
looking to take their skills to the next level. Before diving in, try reading the
following list:
robots.txt
sitemap
nofollow
301 redirect
canonicalization
I f you are not sure what any of the items in this list are, you should goover to the nearest computer and read the article “The Beginner’s Guide to
SEO” at
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-
optimization
This free article can teach you everything you need to know to use this
book to its fullest. Done with that? Great, now we can begin
The Secrets of Popularity
Once upon a time there were two nerds at Stanford working on their PhDs.
(Now that I think about it, there were probably a lot more than two nerds at
Stanford.) Two of the nerds at Stanford were not satisfied with the current
options for searching online, so they attempted to develop a better way.
Being long-time academics, they eventually decided to take the way
academic papers were organized and apply that to webpages. A quick
and fairly objective way to judge the quality of an academic paper is to see
how many times other academic papers have cited it. This concept was
easy to replicate online because the original purpose of the Internet was to
share academic resources between universities. The citations manifested
themselves as hyperlinks once they went online. One of the nerds came up
with an algorithm for calculating these values on a global scale, and they
both lived happily ever after.
Of course, these two nerds were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the
founders of Google, and the algorithm that Larry invented that day was
what eventually became PageRank. Long story short, Google ended up
becoming a big deal and now the two founders rent an airstrip from NASA
so they have somewhere to land their private jets. (Think I am kidding?
See http://searchengineland.com/your-guide-to-the-google-jet-12161.)
The Secrets of Relevancy
In the previous section, I discussed how popular pages (as judged by links)
rank higher. By this logic, you might expect that the Internet’s most popular
pages would rank for everything. T o a certain extent they do (think
Wikipedia!), but the reason they don’t dominate the rankings for every
search result page is that search engines put a lot of emphasis on
determining relevancy.
Text Is the Currency of the Internet
Relevancy is the measurement of the theoretical distance between two
corresponding items with regards to relationship. Luckily for Google and
Microsoft, modern-day computers are quite good at calculating this
measurement for text.
By my estimations, Google owns and operates well over a million
servers. The electricity to power these servers is likely one of Google’s
larger operating expenses. This energy limitation has helped shape
modern search engines by putting text analysis at the forefront of search.
Quite simply, it takes less computing power and is much simpler
programmatically to determine relevancy between a text query and a text
document than it is between a text query and an image or video file. This is
the reason why text results are so much more prominent in search results
than videos and images.As of this writing, the most recent time that Google publicly released the
size of its indices was in 2006. At that time it released the numbers shown
in Table 1-1.
Table 1-1: Size of Google Indices
Data Size in Terabytes
Crawl Index 800
Google Analytics 200
Google Base 2
Google Earth 70
Orkut 9
Personalized Search 4
So what does this emphasis on textual content mean for SEOs? T o me,
it indicates that my time is better spent optimizing text than images or
videos. This strategy will likely have to change in the future as computers
get more powerful and energy efficient, but for right now text should be
every SEO’s primary focus.
But Why Content?
The most basic structure a functional website could take would be a blank
page with a URL. For example purposes, pretend your blank page is on
the fake domain www.WhatIsJessicaSimpsonThinking.com. (Get it? I t is a
blank page.) Unfortunately for the search engines, clues like top-level
domains (.com, .org, and so on), domain owners (WHOIS records), code
validation, and copyright dates are poor signals for determining relevancy.
This means your page with the dumb domain name needs some content
before it is able to rank in search engines.
The search engines must use their analysis of content as their primary
indication of relevancy for determining rankings for a given search query.
For SEOs, this means the content on a given page is essential for
manipulating—that is, earning—rankings. In the old days of AltaVista andother search engines, SEOs would just need to write “Jessica Simpson”
hundreds times on the site to make it rank #1 for that query. What could be
more relevant for the query “Jessica Simpson” than a page that says
Jessica Simpson 100 times? (Clever SEOs will realize the answer is a
page that says “Jessica Simpson” 101 times.) This metric, called
keyword density, was quickly manipulated, and the search engines of the
time diluted the power of this metric on rankings until it became almost
useless. Similar dilution has happened to the keywords meta tag, some
kinds of internal links, and H1 tags.
Link Relevancy
As search engines matured, they started identifying more metrics for
determining rankings. One that stood out among the rest was link
relevancy.
The difference between link relevancy and link popularity (discussed in
the previous section) is that link relevancy does not take into account the
power of the link. Instead, it is a natural phenomenon that works when
people link out to other content.
Let me give you an example of how it works. Say I own a blog where I
write about whiteboard markers. (Y es, I did just look around my office for
an example to use, and yes, there are actually people who blog about
whiteboard markers. I checked.) Ever inclined to learn more about my
passion for these magical writing utensils, I spend part of my day reading
online what other people have to say about whiteboard markers.
On my hypothetical online reading journey, I find an article about the
psychological effects of marker color choice. Excited, I go back to my
website to blog about the article so (both of) my friends can read about it.
Now here is the critical takeaway. When I write the blog post and link to the
article, I get to choose the anchor text. I could choose something like “click
here,” but more likely I choose something that it is relevant to the article. In
this case I choose “psychological effects of marker color choice.”
Someone else who links to the article might use the link anchor text
“marker color choice and the effect on the brain.”
As search engines matured, they started identifying more metrics for
determining rankings. One that stood out among the rest was link
relevancy.
The difference between link relevancy and link popularity (discussed in
the previous section) is that link relevancy does not take into account the
power of the link. Instead, it is a natural phenomenon that works when
people link out to other content.
Let me give you an example of how it works. Say I own a blog where I
write about whiteboard markers. (Y es, I did just look around my office for
an example to use, and yes, there are actually people who blog about
whiteboard markers. I checked.) Ever inclined to learn more about my
passion for these magical writing utensils, I spend part of my day reading
online what other people have to say about whiteboard markers.
On my hypothetical online reading journey, I find an article about the
psychological effects of marker color choice. Excited, I go back to my
website to blog about the article so (both of) my friends can read about it.
Now here is the critical takeaway. When I write the blog post and link to the
article, I get to choose the anchor text. I could choose something like “click
here,” but more likely I choose something that it is relevant to the article. In
this case I choose “psychological effects of marker color choice.”
Someone else who links to the article might use the link anchor text
“marker color choice and the effect on the brain.”
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