Archive: January, 2009

Where n = Greed divided by Green

Let’s pull back from the dead tree of sloppy images that end up being jammed in my mailbox by a postie who’s in a bind to get back to his avatar flings in Second Life. I’m referring here to the type of fishing net marketing campaigns where legions of healthy trees are felled just to print high gloss images of ultra-swank condos, or other things I cannot afford, or afford to be consumables in my life. This practice, this misguided and ill-informed practice – junk mail – in the literal sense, is considered a form of traditional advertising and awarded all the trappings of legitimacy.

The tree-killer advertising game is hopefully someday going to reach a breaking point. Firstly, it doesn’t really work – but, oh, somebody bought that thing in the flyer this week. Ok, it does work, but only if the cost of blanket coverage is covered by the return sales. I was watching a documentary the other day on the disappearance of the Maya, not the Leonard Nimoy coffee-table book stuff, but a real documentary, and I found myself amazed that such a sophisticated society could be brought to its knees in part by their practice of limestoning the outer surfaces of their temples – a practice that required the culling of forests to produce large quantities of limestone – and yet, they didn’t stop applying limestone on their temples until it was already too late. And every time I see junk mail in my mailbox, I see us walking the dark road to Tikal.

What can an SEO firm do for your PageRank? To answer this question we need to take a quick look at surfer models. I’m not talking about babes with boards hanging around a surf shack, I’m talking about how the original PageRank algorithm reflects what is known as the random surfer model, which is a room full monkeys with Internet-connected laptops type of scenario in which a page’s rank is determined by the probability that at least one of the monkeys will visit a desired page by clicking links at random. This random business is misleading though – surfers do not as a rule randomly visit webpages – instead, they pursue links that match their own interests and intentions. Enter the intentional surfer model in which a page’s rank includes, and is partially based on, how many real users actually visit the page. Now we are beginning to venture into the territory of search engine optimization because under the intentional surfer model, the x-factor is the identification and matching of keywords and keyword phrases.

When you are reading a mystery novel, some pages are obviously more important than others. One page of a who-dunnit will feature the ghastly murder by an unidentified hand, another page, usually the last page, will have the smooth-thinking inspector calling out the murderer in a hotel bar, or a ballroom on a luxury cruise ship. Either way, the “Col. Mustard did it with the lead pipe in the billiard room” page is a very important page. If you were to rank the pages in the mystery novel, the page where the identity of the murderer is revealed would in all likelihood be number one with a bullet.

But who decides which page is important? What if I simply want to know what the inspector’s dim-witted assistant was wearing in the Monte Carlo scene on page 42. I’d say page 42 was the more important page, based on my criteria. Good thing there’s a page rank tool, oddly enough called PageRank™ (the trademark is owned by Google, but the patent underneath the hood was developed by Stanford University who has leased exclusive license rights to Google for 1.8 million shares of Google, which were sold in 2005 for $336 million USD). Over the next two blog installments we’ll pop the hood on PageRank™ and see what makes it tick – the original developer was Larry Page, hence PageRank. Now would be a good time to mention that this exploration is not pro or con Google and we should also mention that Yahoo! developed a similar tool, called Webrank that was highly touted in 2004.

If we take a good look at the witch’s brew that is SEO, we can easily recognise the algorithms and probabilities that go into the great cast-iron cooking pot known as search results. We can all appreciate the magic and wizardry that takes a simple, undoctored website and thrusts it onto the world stage. But the one thing, the one Eye of Newt that some clients can’t seem to get their hands around is the practice of patience. And this mana is perhaps one of the most important ingredients in the recipe for a successful SEO venture.

To be blunt, if an SEO firm is built on a foundation of strong ethics, they will offer a prescription of patience in order to let their work take effect. Changes will not take effect overnight – a curt snap of the refresh button is not going to bump you to the front of the line. When you look back at the development of an optimized website, chances are, you worked in a collaborative environment, either with a business partner or SEO staff to create you new site. But this relationship does not divorce itself because of a launch – in fact, it is in the vapor trails of your launch that you and the SEO pros will fine tune your creation. This is a tough pill to swallow in the instant gratification universe, but patience has a great ROI.