SEO Fundamentals

Four Fundamental Principles of SEO

Originally published at SEOMoz, Four Fundamental Principles of SEO lays the foundation for many of the principles I have written about through the years. To ensure the best possible chances of success, your search engine optimization should take these principles into consideration.

• Visibility: Visibility refers to how people hear about your Web site. Articles, advertisements, word-of-mouth, and links all contribute to visibility. So does your site's own content. Your personal conversations also add to visibility.
• Content Organization: Content needs to be presented in a logical, consistent format so that it can be crawled, indexed, and determined to be highly relevant to desired queries. It also needs to be compelling and interesting.
• Keyword Research: You have to know what people search for, why they search for it, and what they expect to find.
• Links: Every Web site needs links to be crawled and validated by the search engines, but links also provide alternative sources of traffic as well as contributing to visibility.

PageRank: What works, what doesn't work

Originally published at Spider-food, PageRank: Where it helps, where it doesn't help, and other facts rounds up independently verifiable information about PageRank. If you are going to incorporate PageRank into your search engine optimization strategies, this is what you need to know. Google engineer Matt Cutts reviewed the paper but he only offered one point of clarification (you should not assume that either Matt or Google endorses anything I have to say). When Matt speaks of "external PageRank", he is referring to what we usually call "Toolbar PageRank".

• PageRank: Where It Helps

  1. "One of the classic crawling strategies that Google has used is the amount of PageRank on your pages."
  2. "The Google Web Directory starts with a collection of websites selected by Open Directory volunteer editors. Google then applies its patented PageRank technology to rank the sites based on their importance."
  3. "Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm." (By Spring 2006, at least some Google employees were claiming more than "300 mechanisms" are used in determining rankings.)
  
  

• PageRank: Where It Doesn't Help

  1. "...link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)."
  2. Google..."conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted." PageRank is added to a relevance score that is derived from other criteria.
  3. Any link using rel=nofollow will not pass PageRank. Same for any page using robots meta tag with noindex or nofollow.
  
  

• PageRank: Other Facts

  1. "...PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one".
  2. "Yes, a one-page site can have high PageRank."
  3. "If you go back to the original PageRank papers, these links were treated as uniform--on-site vs. off-site didn't matter."
  4. Toolbar PageRank is not for 'entertainment purposes only'. GoogleGuy said this, adding that "millions of toolbar users use the PageRank display to judge the quality of pages".
  5. External PageRank (Toolbar PageRank) is only updated every 3-4 months.

What Affects Search Engine Rankings

Search engines rank their results first and foremost on the basis of relevance. Relevance is determined by the contents of Web pages. Every Web page may be relevant to many different queries. Each page will be more relevant for some queries and less relevant for others. At the highest conceptual level, search engine rankings are determined by four general classes of factors:

1. Everything you do on your pages and for your pages (linking, promotion, etc.)
2. Everything other Webmasters do on their pages and for their pages
3. What the search engines do to determine which pages are relevant to queries and how to order or sort those selected pages
4. What people actually search for with their queries

Most SEOs today mistakenly believe that rankings have been driven by linkage. That is only indirectly true of a small fraction of all queries. You can assert relevance for a page through the anchor text pointing to that page. Link anchor text-based ranking is the most popular search optimization strategy in use today. However, this is not the only way to achieve high rankings and, quite frankly, it is (in my opinion) the least efficient, most difficult way to achieve high rankings.