SEO

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information in a format which will make search engines believe that your content satisfies the needs of their users for relevant search queries. SEO, like search, is a field much older than I am. In fact, it was not originally even named search engine optimization, and to this day most people are still uncertain where that phrase came from.

Early SEO

Early search engine optimization consisted mostly of using descriptive file names, page titles, and meta descriptions. As search advanced on the page factors grew more important and then people started trying to aim for specific keyword densities.

Link Analysis

One of the big things that gave Google an advantage over their competitors was the introduction of PageRank, which graded the value of a page based on the number and quality of links pointing at it. Up until the end of 2003 search was exceptionally easy to manipulate. If you wanted to rank for something all you had to do was buy a few powerful links and place the words you wanted to rank for in the link anchor text.

Search Gets More Sophisticated

On November 15, 2003 Google began to heavily introduce many more semantic elements into its search product. Researchers and SEO's alike have noticed wild changes in search relevancy during that update and many times since then, but many searchers remain clueless to the changes.

Search engines would prefer to bias search results toward informational resources to make the commercial ads on the search results appear more appealing. You can see an example of how search can be biased toward commercial or informational resources by playing with Yahoo! Mindset.

Curbing Link Spam

On January 18, 2005, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! announced the release of a NoFollow tag which allows blog owners to block comment spam from passing link popularity. People continued to spam blogs and other resources, largely because search engines may still count some nofollow links, and largely because many of the pages they spammed still rank.

Since 2003 Google has came out with many advanced filters and crawling patterns to help make quality editorial links count more and depreciate the value of many overtly obvious paid links or other forms of link manipulation.

Historical, Editorial, & Usage Data

Older websites may be given more trust in relevancy algorithms than newer websites (just existing for a period of time is a signal of quality). All major search engines use human editors to help review content quality and help improve their relevancy algorithms. Search engines may factor in user acceptance and other usage data to help determine if a site needs reviewed for editorial quality and to help determine if linkage data is legitimate.

Google has also heavily pushed giving away useful software, tools, and services which allow them to personalize search results based on the searcher's historical preferences.

Self Reinforcing Market Positions

In many verticals search is self reinforcing, as in a winner take most battle. Jakob Nielsen's The Power of Defaults notes that the top search result is clicked on as often as 42% of the time. Not only is the distribution and traffic stream highly disproportionate, but many people tend to link to the results that were easy to find, which makes the system even more self reinforcing, as noted in Mike Grehan's Filthy Linking Rich.

A key thing to remember if you are trying to catch up with another website is that you have to do better than what was already done, and significantly enough better that it is comment worthy or citation worthy. You have to make people want to switch their world view to seeing you as an authority on your topic. Search engines will follow what people think.

Hypocrisy in Search

Google engineer Matt Cutts frequently comments that any paid link should have the nofollow attribute applied to it, although Google hypocritically does not place the nofollow attribute on links they buy. They also have placed their ads on the leading Warez site and continued to serve ads on sites that they banned for spamming. Yahoo! Shopping has also been known to be a big link buyer.