Why would someone like myself want to publish my SEO secrets for the
world to read? Doesn’t this destroy my competitive advantage? Won’t I
surely go broke and starve on the street? Won’t my friends mock me and
my family disown me?
For two reasons, the answer is probably not.
The first reason is the size of the market. The Internet is incredibly
large and growing at an astounding rate. The market for SEO is
following a similar path. There is absolutely no way I could work for all
of the websites that need SEO consulting. As such, I am happy to
pass the work on to others and teach them how to succeed. It is no
money out of my pocket, and it makes me feel like I am contributing
to a greater good. I learned most of what I know about SEO from
others and, as such, feel obligated to spread the knowledge.
The second reason has to do with SEOmoz, the company I used to
work for. SEOmoz provides tools to help SEOs do their jobs. As
such, it is to my advantage to promote and train other SEOs. Just
like Google benefits from getting more people online, I benefit from
teaching others how to do SEO. You may choose to use SEOmoz’s
competitors’ services or you may not. That is completely up to you,
and I will do my best to show you all the available options.
Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
At Google, search engineers talk about “80-20” problems. They are
describing situations where the last 20 percent of the problem is 80
percent of the work. Learning SEO is one of these problems. Eighty
percent of the knowledge SEOs need is available online for free.
Unfortunately, the remaining 20 percent takes the majority of the time and
energy to find and understand. My goal with this book is to solve this
problem by making the last 20 percent as easy to get as the first 80
percent. Though I don’t think I will be able to cover the entire 20 percent
(some of it comes from years of practice), I am going to write as much
actionable advanced material as humanly possible.
This book is for those who already know the basics of SEO and are
looking to take their skills to the next level. Before diving in, try reading the
following list:
robots.txt
sitemap
nofollow
301 redirect
canonicalization
The Secrets of Popularity
Once upon a time there were two nerds at Stanford working on their PhDs.
(Now that I think about it, there were probably a lot more than two nerds at
Stanford.) Two of the nerds at Stanford were not satisfied with the current
options for searching online, so they attempted to develop a better way.
Being long-time academics, they eventually decided to take the way
academic papers were organized and apply that to webpages. A quick
and fairly objective way to judge the quality of an academic paper is to see
how many times other academic papers have cited it. This concept was
easy to replicate online because the original purpose of the Internet was to
share academic resources between universities. The citations manifested
themselves as hyperlinks once they went online. One of the nerds came up
with an algorithm for calculating these values on a global scale, and they
both lived happily ever after.
Of course, these two nerds were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the
founders of Google, and the algorithm that Larry invented that day was
what eventually became PageRank. Long story short, Google ended up
becoming a big deal and now the two founders rent an airstrip from NASA
so they have somewhere to land their private jets.
The Secrets of Relevancy
In the previous section, I discussed how popular pages (as judged by links)
rank higher. By this logic, you might expect that the Internet’s most popular
pages would rank for everything. To a certain extent they do (think
Wikipedia!), but the reason they don’t dominate the rankings for every
search result page is that search engines put a lot of emphasis on
determining relevancy.
Text Is the Currency of the Internet
Relevancy is the measurement of the theoretical distance between two
corresponding items with regards to relationship. Luckily for Google and
Microsoft, modern-day computers are quite good at calculating this
measurement for text.
By my estimations, Google owns and operates well over a million
servers. The electricity to power these servers is likely one of Google’s
larger operating expenses. This energy limitation has helped shape
modern search engines by putting text analysis at the forefront of search.
Quite simply, it takes less computing power and is much simpler
programmatically to determine relevancy between a text query and a text
document than it is between a text query and an image or video file. This is
the reason why text results are so much more prominent in search results
than videos and images.
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