Blog of a Boston-based IT Consultant

SEO is about content and utility. That is the number one lesson that I have learned, through years of hoping that is was about something cool or intensely technical. I would like to be able to say that there is a direct and pragmatic science that can guide your every SEO effort. There is not. If there was, you can bet that someone would have written up a piece of software to write your site for you and code everything exactly as optimal. However, there are specific, proven techniques (and tools such as Overture and the Google Toolbar) that have dramatic effect. Through experience you can learn what works for your site.

You will do ongoing analysis and tweaking. You might want to install something like WebTrends if you dont already have it installed, so you can keep track of where your visitors are coming from. A bot needs to index your content and your site needs to have some usefulness inherent in it so inbound links will be generated organically. I mention this early on because it is something that you can do, right away, to help establish your baseline. An important part of your SEO efforts will be analysing your traffic and inbound links. It is an ongoing process that requires a degree of patience and a mind that appreciates the fact that SEO is as much art as science. Organic links will come, if you build a useful site.

Yeah, I often wonder about the whole “organic” thing myself when it comes to technology. I thought that organic implied “of the Earth” but I guess it means “natural” more than anything else. I hate to think that humankind thinks all this technology is anything but a tool, although in some ways it is an extension of ourselves. It is interesting how viral marketing and organic results work. It is almost creepy, the way the internet has grown and adapted. It is certainly compelling. If you want to see a fantastic example of how useful the overlap between community and technology can be, a site like Yelp or Instructables are good places to start. Soon, the Semantic Web will change the way the world learns and catalogs information. Please don’t sign up with Faceb00k (no link for them). It’s owner, Little Zuckerman, is a real ass, although a pretty saavy ass.

That was a slightly tangential diatribe. I apologize.

Anyhow, back to business. A ‘bot will attempt to ascertain what a page and a site is about and how it is organized. This is an extremely complicated and secretive business that holds very close to it’s core the concept of keywords and keyword combinations. Google uses carefully guarded algorithms to do its indexing, but they have only obviated the importance of keywords. Keywords have been a hot topic in SEO since it’s inception. The search engine systems are aware of various “Black Hat” strategies that webmasters use to artificially make their site look more important than it is. Gateway pages, redirects, embedding either tiny keywords or keywords in the same color as the page’s background are too risky to use nowadays. I would have no problem leveraging whatever I could - within reason - to help a client achieve their goals, but doing something unethical is just too risky. If you get your site blacklisted, it is darn near impossible to get off of that list and become accepted again. Google is too busy to go out of their way for you when you have shown that you actively try to get around the rules they have set. Behave thyself. It is a bit more work, but it pays off in the end.

Google also knows that if someone searches on a specific keyword combination, such as “Boston SEO”,pages with that exact phrase in them are likely to be most relevant. However, pages with those two words in very close proximity, like “MIT Technical does the best SEO in Boston”, and also pages with those two words in looser proximity might be perfectly relevant and useful to the user. A keyword combination, or phrase, can be and is broken down into its component words. That is why if you search for “SEO Bahston” it may ask you if you mean “SEO Boston”. It isn’t that it understands the way we speak in these here parts, it is that there is a bit of intelligence behind the curtain. As webmasters, we can take advantage of that and avoid having to accomodate for misspellings on our pages.

The exact mechanisms that Google uses to determine which of its indexed pages are returned at the top of the list is a trade secret. Even if you found out what it was, you’d be in a boatload of trouble if you told anyone. It changes with fair regularity anyhow, and by the time you figured it out it would have changed. Certain things do not change, however, and these are our guiding principles of SEO. The first is that you need useful content that contains keywords and is visible to the ‘bots. Yes, that is a compound principle.

Another principle is that you want to be the site that is returned towards the top of the list. The vast majority of people searching on a given search term will click one of the top three results that Google or another search engine system returns to them, even though you may have noticed that they are not the best. Majority rules, and the top three spots are coveted positions. Competition is fierce, and the more you or your SEO consultant knows, the more SEO is considered a priority early on, and the more keyword analysis (really part of SEO) you do, the better off you are. Remember what GI Joe said.

SEO Joe?

You might find that your most obvious keywords are also extremely competitive. You might be better off going with keywords that are a little less frequently searched, but have significantly less competition. I will get into this a little later.

Keywords will help drive the bots to properly index your pages. Inbound links will help to properly increase your PageRank (Google’s way of determining how worthy your site is of a high ranking).

Interestingly enough, Google’s PageRank system, as developed by two brainy types at Stanford, is public knowledge because it was Patented:

Read the patent for Google PageRank here

Or take a look at this depiction of how Google PageRank works and prepare for a mind-splitting headache

Of course, Google makes everything (even mathematical madness) cutsey and user-friendly, so you may prefer their explanation of PageRank, as intended for people without a PdD in Mathematics:

There you go. Happy balls of color, pointing their finger at each other. These happy balls are casting “votes” for each other and telling Google who is important and deserves a high ranking (of course, besides the folks who bought theirs). This might be a good time to go into a little more detail about PageRank, but I only want to touch on it here. For now, just note the size of the balls and the number of fingers pointing at them. It is a pretty good little summation of PageRank.

We must first come to master keywords.

It used to be that if you wrote the word “carrots” a thousand times on your page, your site would be rank highly for the keyword “carrot”. This is no longer the case. You have to play it straight now, and fortunately, if you have a substantive site, playing it straight is easy and helps you in the long run.

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