SEO Blog

Information is the lifeblood of SEO. The more you know about a site you are working on, the better you will perform. Earlier this week, we looked at the most basic tools SEOs use and the steps they take when gathering information about a website they are working on.

Today, I wanted to write about how to figure out a site’s link and site structures. Both provide critical information to SEOs as they mentally outline their campaign techniques.

Standing in the Footprint of Backlinks

Links are the arteries of the web. Search engines tend to use links as a way to gauge the interest in and relative importance of websites. Theoretically, the more links a particular site has directed towards it, the better that site is in the eyes of the engines. Realistically, not all links are created equal and the way links are cultivated or pursued can have a direct effect on how the overall site is perceived by the search engines.
Your “link footprint” is somewhat like a fingerprint. Each website has a unique footprint that tells search engines a great deal about the relevance, seriousness and intent of websites in their indexes. The link footprint is tracked over time and helps provide the search engines a historic overview of the life-span of each site. Google and Yahoo! are both directly influenced by current and historic information drawn from links.

Search marketing has rapidly morphed from the simple days of altering Titles and Tags to today’s extremely complicated, statistic driven sector. The sites we work on today contain a wide variety of file-types and are often far larger than sites were a few years ago. Similarly, the compilation of search results is now based on several off-page factors that can only be measured and massaged as opposed to the performance of relatively easy on-site alterations.

In short, the work-load involved servicing each client has increased significantly. That’s why there are a growing number of tools search engine optimizers use in the course of their daily toils.

Before we dive into the tool shed, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. These aren’t cool power tools like drills, table saws and jackhammers. SEO’s should be so lucky to get to play with those tools. These tools are more like shovels and screwdrivers.
Advanced SEO involves a lot of drudge work. That it is a high-level intellectual career does nothing to relieve the monotony of reading, measuring and assessing lists of potential keyword targets or back-link opportunities. Even working on the social media aspects of client-files gets to be a drag when you don’t have the time to enjoy the social aspect of it. I just wanted to let you know that before you click away from this post to follow one of the links below.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post, title very much tongue in cheek http://www.metamend.com/blog/2005/07/12/hiltons-perverted-bedding-initiative/ Hilton’s perverted bedding initiative”. You’ll need to read the post to understand the joke, but really, it had less to do with Paris Hilton in particular than about Hilton Hotels, and online brand strategy and awareness. The web traffic in response to varied keyword combinations that people used to arrive at that post was interesting. I wrote a little bit about some of those combinations in a follow-up post. There’s been lots of other combinations since, such as “hilton vision”, “hilton vision statement”, and “hilton statement”.

Today, I received a call from a journalist wanting information about Paris Hilton’s web traffic. I took at look at the traffic to this blog on the matter. Unsurprisingly, there’s been an obvious uptick in Hilton related traffic since Paris was sent to jail.

Also, unsurprisingly, none of the queries had phrases like “paris hilton jail”, “hilton jail”, “paris jail”, “paris hilton gets out of jail”, “paris sent to jail”, “paris hilton” or “hilton prison” sent any traffic to this blog. I say unsurprisingly because I never wrote anything about “jail” or “prison” in my postings. Why would I? I was writing about branding. Of course, now, in the context of the young lady going to jail, that becomes a different question, as of course the words Paris+hilton+jail are forever linked on umpteen web postings. Who knows, perhaps this site will start getting “jail bedding” traffic as a result?

Google Vice President of Engineering, Udi Manber gave a short outline of challenges Google faces in a 15 minute presentation at the Supernova 2007 conference. Billed as a conference examining “…the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy”, Supernova looks to be as much a conceptual show as it is a technical one.

Sean Ammirati from Read/WriteWeb was at the event and gives a good rundown of what Google’s VP of Engineering had to say. According to a post at the Read/WriteWeb blog, Manber explained a range of issues that keep his staff working late at night.

First of all, imagine dealing scalability and compatibility issues with something as large as Google’s networks.

As a network of sites, indexes, services, directories, advertisers and users, Google is absurdly enormous. Chances are, very few, if any, know exactly how big it really is. Imagine trying to match information from literally billions of sources written in thousands of human and machine languages together through an increasingly narrowing funnel until you boil them into a coherent set of search results on a user’s monitor. Now try doing it with uniformity and style.