Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

Now, you won’t hear us saying, “algorithm, shmalgorithm” (though in the next

chapter, we will say, “PageRank, ShmageRank”…stay tuned). One of the Eternal

Truths we’ve learned over the years is this:

It’s fine to keep an eye on the latest and greatest rumors about

exactly

how

Google works, but don’t go nuts or you will lose focus on what really matters: your

site visitors.

Humans Are Smart—Computers Aren’t

Let’s face it: The search engine’s job is not easy. Take a look at your filing cabinet, mul-

tiply it by about a billion, and imagine someone throwing you a couple of words and

then hovering impatiently behind you, tapping a toe, expecting you to find exactly the

right document in the blink of an eye. Nobody could! We humans are wonderfully

intelligent creatures, but we’re just a tad on the slow side when compared to comput-

ers. Unfortunately, machines are still just that: machines. They struggle with ambiguity

that even a kindergarten student could handle. Not to mention misspellings, regional

dialects, and punctuation. For search engines to bring back great results, they need to

combine the best of both worlds: the speed of the machines and the intelligence of the

human mind.

What’s a search engine developer to do? Two things: First, combine results from

several sources, as discussed earlier. This allows the search engines to intertwine the

massiveness of the machine-driven system (robot results) with the finesse of the human

touch (directory and PPC results). Second, structure the ranking algorithms to integrate

“votes” from human beings. Putting the human touch into a ranking algorithm can be

done in a variety of ways, and search engines continue to experiment with solutions.

Counting inbound links from other websites, for example, is a way of measuring how

many votes a site has from human—and presumably intelligent—webmasters. Other

ideas have included measuring how many search engine users click through to your site

and how long they stay.

Social bookmarking sites

and

collaborative tagging

, even com-

paring a person’s current and past searches, are forms of artificial intelligence intended

to improve the search experience.

But artificial intelligence still has as long way to go. In movies you can say to a

computer, “Computer, Rotate and Enhance!” and the computer will somehow manage

Pearl of Wisdom:

Often, factors that matter most in the search engine algorithms are good for

both websites and their users.

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