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Multiobjective optimization means simultaneously finding a good solution that works for multiple measures of success.  Is Google currently using this idea to determine page rankings?  Can ELW reverse engineer Google’s search algorithms by assuming they are using these techniques?  The trick would be to figure out what Google wants to improve.  Obviously, Google makes money when searchers click on ads next to search results.  Directly optimizing search results to increase revenue would probably lead to crappy pages taking up the first few positions.  This would increase the number of people clicking on ads instead of search results.  I’m not so sure Google would do this, since the extra revenue may be at the cost of losing those customers next time.  The only alternative left is for Google to try to maximize long term revenue by maintaining the quality of organic search results.  This is a multiobjective optimization problem!

First, let me say that this is only speculative.  Anyone who has read my other articles can figure out what my basic view on Google are.  I suspect that what Google does is much less sophisticated than any theoretical optimization problem would allow.  Good optimization techniques are slow, and don’t scale well to anything near the size of Google.  It sure is lucky for the world of computer scientists that simple and fast ideas work so well.  Sometimes “dumb” solutions actually work better!

Forget everything you think goes into a search engine’s ranking algorithm for a minute.  How would you compare the quality of two different algorithms?  You need to actually put them into practice and look at the click-through data!  Which ranking components lead to the most clicks on the first few results?  Which bad ranking components lead people to enter a different query, or look at search results on the second and third pages before they find what they want?

I have done quite a bit of experimenting on this, and have developed a combined algorithm for improving search engine ranking algorithm quality by optimizing for positive click feedback.  Contact ELW if you have a few million dollars and want to give Google a serious run for their money!

This morning Google turned off some of the less used mechanisms for obtaining search results.  The search result scraper Scroogle.com is temporarily unable to provide search results.  The site used to be a useful tool to get search results without any warping due to location and user info.  A quick check of the SEO tool Rank Checker shows that search engine rankings are not provided for the Google column anymore.  There is no possibility that this is a coincidence.

I can only speak for ELW, but I hope that the world sees this for what it is.  Google only wants you to use their services when they control the medium.  This makes some sense if they were losing money from scrapers, but we know that isn’t true.  This truly is an act of aggression against professional SEO firms everywhere.  Don’t get me wrong, ELW has not been inconvenienced at all because our research doesn’t rely on the same back doors as Scroogle and rank checker.  Maybe this is a good thing, and no complaints are necessary?

There is much more to this outage than meets the eye.  I’ll save the real conspiracy theories for our paying customers!  More to come.

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.

I just watched the movie “Funny People” where one of the characters made a funny cat video that got hundreds of thousands of hits.  He then linked the video to his website.  Of course doing this kind of thing doesn’t necessarily get you the type of traffic you want, but it definitely does work.

Generally, you aren’t going to get a followed link from a site like youtube where anybody can post things.  There are opportunities for followed links on video sites, but I won’t go over them here.  The point of getting links isn’t always to increase pagerank.  99% or more users won’t even know the difference.  You should be interested in traffic generated by people watching your video.  If you can get thousands of views on a video you post, you should be able to get a small percentage of them to come to your site!

It is very easy to become a recording artist these days.  If you have any talent you can probably publish your own songs or comedy for download.  Have you ever noticed when you type in the title of an old song, the first search result is usually a wikipedia entry?  Have you ever looked at the wikipedia entry?  The cool thing is that almost all wikipedia entries for songs have a list of who has covered the song including a link!  Again, this probably won’t be a followed link but nobody will notice.  Anybody can edit a wikipedia page.

The point of this article is that people become so obsessed with getting followed links, that they ignore opportunities for nofollowed links that will likely get them better traffic!  You need to expand your link building horizons.  Every single link can be clicked by interested people.  Keep your eyes open!

The secret to generating very large quantities of content for your web site is to get others to do it for you.  Not everybody is willing to spend their own time writing about the same topic every day.  As long as writing articles or blog entries has a positive effect on search engine rankings, there will continue to be a need for this service.  There is no question that regularly writing articles on a blog will help your site.  Possibly even more than getting inbound links.  The best mix of articles to have on your site should include a wide array of perspectives on a central theme.  Obviously the central theme on the ELWsoftware.com blog is search engine optimization.

People get tired of reading the same stuff over and over again.  It gets boring even if the subjects change every day.  Listening to the same side of the story will drive away listeners.  I suggest trying to outsource your content generation.  There is no shortage of writers out there who are willing to produce articles for you like they are going out of style.  I suggest looking at options that include talented English-speaking writers from another country.  Not only can you get articles written for less money, you increase your site’s familiarity in foreign countries.

Never overlook an option to get more content on your site!

Haven’t you heard of outsourcing?  Through the magic of the internet, anybody can have work done by the lowest bidder as easily as hiring someone locally!  Obviously, all things being equal, you will get your work done by the lowest cost provider.  Wouldn’t it be great if all of your SEO work could be done this way?

ELWsoftware.com tried to be a provider on the Elance website, but soon we realized that we couldn’t compete with the prices offered by an SEO in India.  Instead of crying over this news, we see it as an opportunity!  Simple economics suggests that our ability to sell SEO services at $100 an hour combined with an SEO in India doing the work for $10-15 an hour is smart.  Take a few minutes to think about that!

Think about the current SEO situation and how it works.  A while back I described an idea for an SEO crowdsourcing website.  The idea was to allow users to recommend changes and improvements to a website.  Typical SEO thinking would say that this would mean giving away the secrets of the trade.  My opinion is that there aren’t any secrets.  Everybody knows about keywords, titles, and link building.  Everything else is either black-hat or speculative.  The crowdsourcing part would come in when the site owner would discover that everyone was offering the same or similar services.  At least this would result in a better understanding of their problems.  Maybe it would prevent them falling victim to some graphic designer charging them $1000 for putting some keywords in html tags!

Can you really get 10x the work done for your money with an SEO from India?  I’ll be doing it as an experiment, and I’ll let you know the results in further posts!

The SEO trick for today is a list of chores you might be putting on your list of things to do tomorrow.  I suggest taking a day off and getting some things done.  Let’s do some SEO housecleaning.

1. Do all of your html page titles contain what they should?  Spend a few minutes actually browsing your site to see if everything is up to date.  Are you trying to rank for the same keywords as when you made the page?
2. Are there current links to your best blog posts?  People will only click a finite number of links before they give up looking.  Do you have good articles buried deep in some archive?
3. Can you summarize some of your articles on a free press release site?  Can you write an article for ezinearticles instead of your blog?
4. Can you spend as much effort leaving a comment as you would on a blog post?  I think you would be surprised how willing people are to approve posts that are obviously not spam.
5. Have you written enough blog posts to fill a solid ebook?  Why not put one together and give it away free.
6. Can you add some screenshots to improve an old blog post?
7. Are you currently tracking all the information about users that you could be?  People might be finding your site with queries you aren’t even imagining.  ELW can provide excellent website visitor tracking in PHP.  This means that it can also track users who block Javascript.
8. Do a quick survey of pages that link to your site.  Give some of the better pages a mention in your blog.
9. Try using a different search engine for a while to look up your site.  Searching for a key phrase and clicking on your site in results can’t hurt.
10. Give someone else a link at random.  You can always delete it later!

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.

What does it mean to reserve a domain name?  A domain name is quite possibly the most important choice you will need to make when starting an online business.  Reserving a good domain name has many benefits including the following:

1. Your domain name will be visible on every page on your site, forever.
2. A search engine must give heavy weight to sites with the query in the domain name.  They have to assume that many of the queries are specifically looking for your site.
3. Owning a domain name is the most permanent choice you can make regarding your search engine rankings.

You can reserve any domain name that is available, but how do you know which ones are a better investment?  This blog has written on the subject of finding a good domain name in the past.  The choice of domain names usually goes in one of two directions:

• Find a domain name that matches your expected search queries as closely as possible.  This strategy would prefer “domain.com” over “godaddy.com” for example.
• Choose a domain name that doesn’t mean anything, but has no competition.  This strategy would prefer “yahoo.com” over “search.com” because the originality makes it memorable.

The second strategy gambles that it is easier to change people’s search habits than it is to compete for position with existing search queries.  This is an important consideration because it could take years to get a decent search engine ranking even if your domain is the exact search query.  On the other hand, a domain name that doesn’t mean anything can become the #1 search result within a number of days.  All things being equal, getting traffic to your site is much easier if you don’t have to compete.

Reserving a good domain name is so important that you probably shouldn’t limit yourself to purchasing just one.  Even if you are purchasing a premium domain that costs a large amount of money, give yourself a few alternatives.  Hosting your site on multiple domains is easier if you reserve the domain names from the start.  You can even host your site on one domain while you wait for a better one to expire!

ELW welcomes your comments on this subject.