Confused By Search Engine Optimization? Try This ‘Laypersons Guide To Understanding SEO’

By Chris Frerecks • June 4th, 2009

Apologize for the long posts lately, but know they relate directly to what questions we’re hearing in the field from small to medium sized business folks just like you.

Laypersons Guide To SEOThe Absolute Basics

What is it all about? It’s about leveraging the Internet, a worldwide network of interconnected computers. It’s about leveraging the World Wide Web, an *Internet application* for helping people to access our web page information.

Yet, with trillions of web pages to navigate, it is very difficult for people to find the good information we business people have to offer.

Search Engines solve this problem by crawling, indexing, ranking and essentially preparing as many pages on the web as possible so that when people search they can find our good information.

Search engines are consumer answer systems and they provide us business people with targeted organic and pay-per-click advertising opportunities; however, unlike with traditional advertising, consumers can get the information they desire exactly when they want it. Rather than interrupting the consumer, search engine optimization or search engine marketing helps the consumer find us!

Define SEO or Search Engine Optimization

Wikipedia.org, the free online encyclopedia, defines Search Engine Optimization [SEO] as the,

“subset of search engine marketing that seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” ["organic" or "algorithmic"] search results. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing first to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and secondly to human visitors. The term SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.”

We’d add we believe achieving SEO centers 1.) on web page optimization [proper content creation], 2.) off web page optimization [the activity that stems from that content] and 3.) in web page optimization [site/ page crawler friendliness.] On a larger scale we all need to think beyond search engines, to a broader web optimization. Achieving either one however, is neither basic nor simple.

While your site[s] must be search crawler friendly, it’s not necessarily the site the search engines want. The fact is, search engines rank each page, rather than the site itself. Know that search engines want all the content contained in all your web pages and site signals like active new content can certainly help to get you more & deeper crawler visitation. This is an important thing to understand when it comes to SEO because search engines actually need the current information produced in your new pages [on all subjects] in order to succeed in their own business. Hint: be a focused current coverage information provider!

Signals Used To Rank Content

A confused client once told me, “Your competitor told me my blog is poor because I’m not ranking for a particular phrase.” A quick glance at my clients’ descriptive tags, categories and content showed their blog site did not contain the phrase, so short some form of artificial or god-like intelligence how could they be in the index, none the less rank for that phrase? Shame on the competitor for being misleading, but clearly the client had not asked us to build the phrase into their tags, nor had they written or blogged it. Clearly, the issue was they had NOT targeted the phrase.

At it’s core, SEO is still target key word and phrase driven. Regardless of the old or new signals, your search engine and web optimization should be centered on the key words and phrases we wish to be discovered for. As the top priority, we must understand and we must target the language of our consumer when advertising online; however, it’s much more complicated than just that… or everyone would easily search optimize to the top.

Search crawler, spider and bot are interchangeable terms for what search engines use to find and index web pages. The search algorithm is a mathematical formula that uses a couple hundred different page signals. Namely signals like key word or phrase usage on a page, the number of links that page has, the quality of the links and many many others to [then] rank pages for the content they contain. When it comes to information retrieval [IR] or search, text and link analysis as signals are being diminished some, yet they remain a large part of an ever evolving science for ranking content.

Links on the web are growing by the billions per day and a great deal of them are calculated or gamed. If we know there’s gaming out there, you can bet the algorithm engineers knew and began taking steps to deal with it months ago. They’re abnormally smart people; they have a great deal of resources, unrivaled user data for analysis and they have an interest in fighting gaming to assure the best user experience is possible. If you’re gaming… it’s your time and money. Good luck.

Either way, trying to discover and rank existing pages in the index accurately, while dealing with the massive arrival of new web content is NOT easy for search engines. The cost of crawl & index bandwidth alone for this process is a giant business challenge. So, in a world where search engines must be able to provide the most relevant breaking news or risk losing their search user [has free ever driven customer loyalty?], they must also continue to improve the way they identify, index and rank content.

What Are The New Signals Used To Rank Content?

What’s new you ask? How about a reversal of emphasis by the search engines from what site owners do to what web users do. Ha? Consider less [not all] of an emphasis on site text and links and more on what the user chooses from a search, bookmarks, tags, subscribes to, downloads and rates.

Marketing or SEO is becoming less an exercise in broadcasting, than it is listening to what consumers do.

[Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rTzIAWI4Ms]

These consumer signals, previously not counted because they don’t have sites of their own, now influence what web pages are relevant by their usage of various search and social networking applications [i.e. search clicks, bookmarks, tags, subscriptions, downloads and ratings.]

How do search engines track this? In many ways, but how about the ubiquitous Google Search Toolbar for one. Not only can it monitor a consumers click, bookmark, tag, subscription, download, search query chain and rating activity, but it can gauge negative or positive voting by how often she leaves a page immediately [via the back button]. It can even follow the page view path she takes from what she searched. Yes it’s a little scary, but when we saw FREE we all jumped in and loaded that Toolbar without looking back. As ‘supposed anonymous consumers’ the tax we pay for FREE is fodder for another post, but for the purposes of this one you can assume anything free comes with [minimum] some sort of personal data mining. Namely, your activity is data that search engines use to see what is and what is not popular. Better yet, what is and what is not trusted!

Search traffic isn’t fading either. With Internet use and searches rising, search is here for the long haul.

Where Does This Leave SEO?

Your search marketing resources have to contend with this statement by Google, “Let me start with our main goal in web search: to get you [the consumer] to the web pages you want as quickly as possible. Search is not an end in itself; it is merely a conduit.“

Your resources may get you into the top ten for lots of key words and phrases, but is there true visibility, interest and traffic growth? Studies show that searchers rarely go to the second page of search results. Rather, most scan above the fold and, if they don’t see an appealing result, they will actually adjust their search entirely. Has being above the fold become more important than the top 10? Beyond the pay per-click-ads, search engine results have added local content, maps and [with Universal Search] an emphasis on alternative content like video and image. And with the personalization of search results  [yours are different than mine] becoming ever more a reality, is an accurate report even possible?

The question becomes are your website, blog and/ or search optimization resources aware of the new signals? Within their defined scope or responsibility, are they able to develop reliable optimization strategies? There are plenty who sell expensive SEO services, many that try to game search engines entering you into a race you can’t win sustainably. So, if you’re not so knowledgeable, be sure to make cost effective progress and sustainability the realistic goal with any investment!

Can Business People Succeed Reasonably?

We’re not SEOs, but we are an experienced online marketing services company and [with ongoing instructional guidance] our clients do very nicely. We believe SEO is achieved sustainably and cost effectively with consistent focused content coverage that targets a marketplace. We advocate pushing that content wider and also motivating activity around it. One very straight forward example might be based upon Universal Search and Google’s interest in video content.

Folks, it’s not just the search engines, but complete web optimization that we need. We achieve SEO reasonably with focus, consistency, proper content creation, activity that stems from that content and site/ page crawler friendliness. We see clients do it every day.

Comments(0) BLOGGING SEO

Comments

By Kenneth Udut on July 11th, 2009 at 8:41 am

It’s tough to figure out the changing rules of Google. Things that worked for years no longer do, and making the appropriate modifications to your marketig strategy can be overwhelming at times.

By admin on July 13th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

Agreed. Best you can do is to read their blogs, read the top SEOs, watch what’s working with your own site[s] and draw logical conclusions.

 

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