ELWsoftware.com

There was a typical Slashdot article today about how Bing lost the search engine “war” because they didn’t focus on the long tail.  Since nobody should take things on Slashdot too seriously, I rarely do more than scan the comments.  This article contained a comment from someone about how “Bing sucks” because his website which is the absolute authority on a very obscure keyword is #5 on Bing.  Some professional SEO replied to that comment and called the guy a moron.  I have to agree.

Maybe the guy should call up Microsoft and tell them that searching for some obscure keyword doesn’t bring up the most authoritative result.  I’m joking of course to make a point.  Should the search algorithms for Bing be changed because some moron’s site doesn’t show up where he thinks it should?  By his own admission the keyword is obscure, so what would be the point?  I don’t know!  I witness the same thing with Google and Yahoo as well.

Is it at all surprising that SEO has a bad reputation?

I don’t think it is a mystery at all.  SEO has a bad reputation because the public has little or no understanding of how search engines work.  Is there fraud being committed by less-than-honest SEO companies?  Of course!  I don’t necessarily think this is the problem.  The vast majority of customers we get at ELW have problems with their websites that are so easy to fix that people don’t think we deserve our pay.  The bigger problem with SEO reputation is that people think there is magic involved when there really isn’t.  Should the SEO community start bullshitting our customers more?  Content, metacontent, and links.  Everything else is blackhat.

There really isn’t any value left in being an expert in search engines.  Having a graduate degree in computer science isn’t very useful if all your customers have the same problems:  No titles, text, or links.  There really isn’t much that can be said about the situation.  The reason Amazon.com shows up #1 in a search for “online bookstore” isn’t because they know some secret about SEO that you don’t.  I don’t know what else to say.

So, what can we do to give SEO a better reputation?  Who says we even want SEO to have a good reputation?  Maybe the opposite is true!  SEO should embrace the reputation it has, because we all know some of it is a load of crap.  Be honest, how many of you have optimized sites for keywords that you know nobody will ever type into a search engine?  How many of you have sat back and done nothing, while your client watched in amazement as their site’s ranking improved for no reason?  These examples are true stories I have heard from clients!

The SEO bubble will disappear long before the reputation is repaired.  Search engines are at most a few years away from completely negating all reasonable attempts to influence rankings.  I think they are already there, but many SEOs benefit from the illusion that it is still 1999 technology at work.

I say we try to keep the bad reputation, even if it isn’t deserved.  There are still plenty of sites out there with no text that will keep paying the bills.

Most search engine optimization articles I read usually repeat the same old information.  How many people out there selling SEO services are really just graphic designers who read a book or took an online course?  How many of them would even understand Google’s search engine patents? If you want to separate yourself from the herd, read a little further.  ELW is about to do some real research into how search engines really work!

SEO firms usually to to promote the myth that search engine algorithms are a big secret.  This serves to make them look like really smart people who know all the secrets about getting your web page to rank higher.  Is it true that search engine ranking algorithms are a secret?  Yes and no!  The actual complete piece of software that decides the final rankings is a secret, but nobody should even care about this!  Does knowing the exact weight that Google gives pagerank really help you as an SEO?  No.  The really important search engine ranking factors are not secret at all.

Do you realize how many patents there are dealing with search engines?

There are at least hundreds of patents specifically related to search engine ranking algorithms.  Reading search engine patents could be what sets you apart from all of the phony SEO firms out there.  That would take a lot of work right?  Who wants to read all of that junk?  Don’t worry, ELW is going to summarize important search engine patents, and how they relate to SEO.  Now you won’t need a degree in computer science to be a professional SEO!  If you are interested in link-building and keyword density, you have come to the wrong place.

SEO blogs including this one often mention that search engine ranking algorithms at major search engines are kept secret.  The reason given is that knowing knowing the exact algorithm would allow websites to manipulate their rankings too easily.  I don’t think this is exactly true.  If a search engine admitted that it only used Google’s Pagerank, it would still be extraordinarily difficult to manipulate search results.  The real reason for keeping the algorithms a secret has nothing to do with websites wanting higher ranks.  A search ranking algorithm made available to the public could almost instantly make a search engine obsolete.  If you knew the search algorithm used by Google, you could reproduce the majority of their search functionality with a modest investment in hardware.

If figuring out how Google works is so easy, why hasn’t anyone done it?  I would argue that it has actually been done already.  The real difficulty in reproducing Google does not lie in figuring out the ranking algorithm.  That would be both useless, and expensive.  If you want to reproduce Google’s search capability you need to spend money.  Google is able to spend billions of dollars on its infrastructure because people give them billions in ad revenue.  This is the real secret to reproducing a good search engine.

Wouldn’t it be fun to reverse engineer Google’s search algorithm for SEO?

1. Create a spider program to analyze and index websites.
2. Create a ranking algorithm to sort them according to some measure of relevance.
3. Repeat!

Oh, did you think it would be more complicated than that?  The biggest myth in SEO is that search engines are complicated. They aren’t.  What is complicated is storing a cached copy of every website on the internet.  Add to that the difficulty of running a database capable of generating search results to everybody on the planet at the same time.  Now you see the real secret:  There are no important secrets!

If you want to build a better search engine, the problem is to change what is meant by search.  I think the future holds a better solution than what we have today.  Returning a list of pages is not a very modern way to search.  The only reason Google still does it that way is because they found a way to make money selling ads next to search results.  Organic search results are just there to sell advertising.  It would be an interesting project to create an open source search engine, and ELW is already on the case.  Stay tuned for regular updates.

The trouble with looking for good search engine optimization ideas is that so many blogs and articles are all saying the same things.  If everyone is doing the same things in the name of SEO, how can you rank higher than they do? Sometimes you need to work smarter, not harder. Before you can master SEO, you need to understand the basics.  This article is an overview for beginners to the SEO game.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization.  This means that SEO is the process of improving your site so that you will get more traffic from search engines.  Don’t be scared of search engines!  A search engine is just a computer program designed to find information on the internet.  There is no magic involved.  If you want people to find your site when they search for something, you need to understand how things work.

How do search engines work?

It is actually quite simple.  A program automatically reads your site and makes a list of words and phrases it contains.  When somebody searches for one of those phrases, your site will be among the results.  Usually there are far too many results to show them all on the first page of search results, so the search engine has to decide which results are most likely to be what the searcher was looking for.  There are many ways the search engine does this, and the exact formulas are always kept secret.  Some of the techniques used include the following:

• How accurate is the match between the search phrase and the content of your page?  Closer matches rank higher than approximate matches.
• How many other sites link to your page?  Links from popular sites indicate that your site is also of high quality.  Links from other sites are not very helpful.
• How much visitor traffic does your site get?  Search engines won’t give your site a higher ranking if nobody visits your site.  Being on the first page of results is very valuable.  If nobody clicks on your site when given a list of search results, you could get moved to a later page.

How do you get a higher rank for your site?

• Add more information to your website!  The more ways you describe something, the more likely your site will contain an exact match for search queries.  You never know what people will search for.
• Don’t miss any opportunities to make your site more visible.  Your page titles, descriptions, and headlines should all contain accurate information that search engines will see.  Even the alternate text on images will be seen by search engines.  Don’t leave them blank!
• Get some other sites to link to yours.  Everybody knows that links help your site, so this part of SEO can be a bit like begging for quarters on the street.  This is actually a good analogy!  Beggars and bums get fewer quarters than musicians and performers.  Do you want links out of pity, or because you deserve them?

Getting your site to rank higher in search engines can be difficult and time consuming.  The effort required might not produce the benefits you desire.  ELWsoftware.com will do a free SEO analysis of your site and give you an estimate of the work required to get better rankings.

The basics of modern SEO should include a discussion of three main ideas:

1. Regularly generating content that somebody finds useful.  This means that if you want new visitors to your site, you need to give them more of what they want.  How often do you visit a site that updates every month?  About once a month, at most!  How often do you visit a site that updates daily?  A few times a week, if not every day!
2. Search engine visibility!  If the text on your website is not easily read by a computer program, it won’t be seen as easily.  It really is that simple.  Search engines match the text on your website with keywords people use in their search queries.  It generally doesn’t help to overuse the keywords.  It is more helpful to change your keywords naturally like you would with a thesaurus.  Pay careful attention to your title both in html and on your page.  This is by far the most important place to worry about keywords.
3. Links are not as important as they once were.  Google made its mark by using inbound links to rank web pages, but it isn’t that useful anymore.  The spammers who used to put the same keyword thousands of times on the same page simply changed their tactics.  Now these same spammers put thousands of useless links to themselves to improve their search rankings.  This is why modern SEO professionals came up with the term black-hat SEO.

At ELWsoftware.com, we will analyze the current search engine visibility of your site with no obligations.  Modern SEO best practices require that you consider the value of improving your search engine rankings before spending any money.  You don’t want to pay someone to optimize your website if it isn’t worth the money!

Understanding modern SEO requires more than reading a few articles about link-building.  If you really want to become a better SEO, read some of our summaries of search engine patents for SEO.

Naturally when you are concerned with search engine ranking improvements, you want to be the highest result on the list.  Being ranked #1 on Google for a good keyword is ideal, but what about the other positions?

Is it better to be at the top of the second page, or the bottom of the first page?

I happen to think it is better to be at the top of the second page.  My thinking is that a user navigating off the first page is more motivated to find what he or she wants.  If the first result on the second page is you, that extra face time can only help.

Google is probably aware that the desirability of the search result position does not decrease steadily from #1.

If this is the case, SEO professionals need to approach the problem of SEO with some new thinking.

1. Do some real SEO research for a change, instead of going on and on about meta tags.
2. Find out whether being #11 really is worse than being on the first page.  Measure both page visits and conversion rates.  I realize this kind of research may be outside the capabilities of most web designers pretending to do SEO.  Don’t worry, ELW will do the work for you and you can take the credit.
3. Find out whether Google already arranges search results this way. If Google already treats the top of the next page as better than the bottom of an existing page, you shouldn’t change anything but your thinking.  If you make some improvements to your page, and Google moves you to #11 from #9, it might be better!

If you came to this article wondering how to arrange thing on your page, I’m sorry!

It doesn’t seem as though this would be too big of a trade secret.  Maybe somebody should just ask Google?  In my opinion the whole idea of a list of results broken into chunks of 10 is played out anyway.

The search engine rankings on Google often change dramatically from day to day.  One day an article I write will not show up at all, and the next day it will have the top spot.  This can be extraordinarily confusing for someone new to the SEO game.  The professional SEO Trick is to ignore the day to day changes and focus more on the overall picture:

1. Google’s search engine ranking algorithm is not a static calculation that gives your site a semi-permanent value.  The search results you see are not sorted according to a value that stays the same.
2. For any given time, place, and search query Google may use different methods to rank the sites it finds.  I don’t know what the methods are specifically, but I know a few reasons that they change.

Complex problems such as search have so many possible inputs that finding the optimal values is impossible.  Google is probably using some sort of genetic algorithm or hill-climbing algorithm to find better search methods.  These methods test new ideas, sometimes at random, and the better ones are kept and used.  One can assume that Google is trying to maximize the number of clicks on the first search results.  This would be a good measure of quality for their search engine, as it would suggest that people found what they wanted.  Google could also be trying to maximize clicks on their ads.  This is the same problem computationally, but it has the added effect of making them more money!  I’ll bet the real answer lies somewhere in the middle: A compromise between the quality of search engine rankings, and increasing ad revenue.

The rapid changes in search engine rankings are likely not due to major changes in the search algorithm.

The fickle nature of organic search engine rankings could be due to optimizing the search algorithm.  I can’t speak for Google, but as a computer scientist that is what I would be doing.  Don’t expect that reaching a top search engine ranking position means that you will be there continuously!  Certain queries are probably looking for different things depending on what time it is.

The term meme has often incorrectly been used to refer to internet fads.  This is not precisely correct, even though many internet fads are in fact memes.  A meme is a self-replicating idea.  An idea that encourages its own spread among whatever carriers are available.  SEO could arguably be called a meme, since improving the positioning of a website in search engines also spreads the ideas that improved the rankings themselves.

How can memes be used to improve search engine rankings?

1. Recognize that your site, the search engines, and the visitors to your site are all carriers.  Carriers are not memes.  Memes don’t have purpose or motivation.  Memes spread because of what the carriers do.  The memes that survive are the ones that spread most effectively in the carriers.
2. Recognize what you can change most easily.  You can’t change the search engine ranking algorithms easily.  If you could change the visitors to your site easily, you wouldn’t need SEO.  You are left with the ability to change your site, and what you put there.
3. Recognize that a meme is a self-replicating idea.  This means that it will be copied when it works.  You want this to happen!  By its definition, a meme cannot exist in only one place.  This means that your website will not be the exclusive carrier of the idea.

How can a site benefit if the ideas are allowed to spread?

1. Being closer to the originating point of the meme makes you a source.  This can encourage links, visits, and mentions of your site.
2. Memes take time to spread, and while they are spreading you can be the only one generating content to fit the meme.  Think of it this way:  There is content being generated right now for movies that have not begun production.  Why are they doing this?  They do it because when you actually hear about the movie, all the content will be present on the web.  You don’t need to worry about scrapers and spam blogs stealing your content.  By the time people start stealing your content, the idea and related keywords should already own the top search engine rankings.
3. When you are already the recognized source for the meme, other people spreading the idea helps you the most.  Every new Google search about the meme should bring a new visitor to your site.  This is because searchers gravitate towards the source of the information.

Tomorrow I will go into some specific tactics used to take advantage of memes and improve your search engine rankings.

SEO shouldn’t simply be about finding the top search engine ranking improvements for your website.  Search is a broad term that includes any method of finding what you want.  SEO is about making your page visible to the people who want to find it.  Many SEO purists claim that paying for the opportunity to have your site shown to potential customers is not SEO.  I disagree, since any honest SEO who is worth what you pay will tell you that real search engine ranking improvements take time. What do you as a company while you are waiting for “real SEO” to get your website ranked higher?  The obvious choice is to use Google’s Adwords, or the similar offerings from Bing and Yahoo!

Here is how adwords works in case you haven’t heard:

1. You place a bid on search keywords related to what you sell.
2. Whenever someone searches for those keywords, the search results contain ads for the highest bidders.
3. When someone clicks on the ad, and only when someone clicks on the ad, the bidder pays Google.

What makes Adwords work so well?

• You only pay when someone actually visits your site!
• You get to choose any keywords you want, so pick the best keywords you can.  Choose the keywords that people use when they are ready to make a purchase!
• You choose how much you are willing to pay for a click, and the maximum you are willing to spend overall.  You never pay more!
• Adwords ads are pay-per-click, so your ad gets shown to many more people than you actually pay for.

What is the Adwords conversion rate?

• This is the percentage of visitors who actually make a purchase after clicking your ads.
• If you multiply the average purchase price by your conversion rate, this will give you the maximum bid you should use for your keyword.

How can you improve your Adwords conversion rate?

• The best way to improve your conversion rate is to link your ads to a well designed landing page.  A good landing page should contain only what a visitor needs to see, and nothing else!  Buyers always choose the first option that meets all of their needs.  If that is you, you get the sale!
• Some keywords just don’t work well.  If your keyword has multiple meanings, you had better hope that you are the meaning they want.  If you sell something that has the same name as a popular new video game for example, don’t expect your visitors to be prepared to buy.
• Make sure your ad is very specific.  This will reduce the number of clicks you get, but you will only get clicks from people more ready to buy.

ELW offers some of the best ideas for running a profitable Adwords campaign.  We will give you a free consultation with no obligation to use our services.  Contact us and we will be glad to help out.

I think search engine optimizers have become a bit lazy recently.  Google has been taking it easy too, and collecting their money.  SEO is a game, and the players are you and Google.  Google is going to remind their real competitors, you and your SEO, what makes a good search engine work.  Let me summarize the current view of SEO that is about to change:

1. Google started using inbound links and pagerank to get rid of spam websites.  Back years ago it was possible to trick search engines and rank higher than Microsoft, for example, by putting “Microsoft” a thousand times in text the same color as the background.  Google’s logic was that it was more difficult to fake inbound links than text.  They were right.
2. Since it really is profitable to be ranked higher in search results, people never stopped trying to achieve better search engine rankings.  With Google, this just meant getting inbound links then became the most important SEO trick.
3. Cottage industries appeared (SEO), and offered services meant to improve your search engine rankings.  And the ones who aren’t outright scams actually do some real work.  Most people offering SEO services are able to turn an absolute crap website into a crap website with a slightly improved search engine ranking.

Hasn’t anybody noticed the change in what SEO tactics work recently?  Is your SEO company even paying attention?

Most SEO articles I read talk about Google as though it is running the same algorithm as it did 10 years ago!  They aren’t, and it could cost you quite a bit.  Here is the deal:  I have confirmed my own suspicions by asking some anonymous persons who know, and Google has changed their system in 2010.  Here is what I suspect according to the research lab at ELW.

1. Even very “small” websites can easily get ranked on the first page for some pretty good keywords with zero inbound links from other sites!  There is evidence that this can happen within hours of posting.
2. Paying someone to generate a ton of content for you all at once will not work, even if it is from all different domains linking to you.
3. Generating a thousand one-paragraph articles on your site all at once is not an effective numbers game that will pull in “long-tail” queries.
4. Don’t hire foreign writers to generate content for your English language site! It is an absolute fact that computer science has given us the tools to decipher the origins of text.
5. Don’t even think about using computer generated articles! It is so easy for a computer to detect this junk.  Even the ads for this software sounds foolish with claims like “With this software I can crank out 5 articles a day.”  Five articles a day?  If you can only produce five articles a day, and software does all the work for you, you need to be back in high school!  I won’t provide a link or name for the ad, since I don’t want anybody to buy their stuff.  It’s even possible that this article spawned one of their adsense ads on my page!

Seriously folks, I think Google has figured out how to rid their search rankings of most of the SEOed spam out there.  I usually don’t like to give Google too much credit, but they have definitely made some improvements.  Took their sweet-ass time though, didn’t they?  Now we’re even.