Don’t Forget the Third Leg of SEO — User Behavior
Posted by Edan Shertzer on Dec 3, 2008
Speak to a typical SEO specialist, one who spends a good portion of his or her day trying to make sense of the topsy-turvy world of search engine ranking algorithms, and you’re bound at one point or another to hear him or her sermonize at great length about two things: the enormous and undeniable importance of links and the enormous and undeniable importance of content. Understanding these two elements is crucial to moving up the search engine rankings; think of them as, if you will, the Fantastic Duo of SEO.
Now, the specialist would be 100% right in emphasizing these two elements. Search engines do consider the number and importance of links between pages, the age of those links, how frequently those links are gained or lost, how many of those links are broken, and where those links are originally found. It’s also true that search engines examine the content that appears on web pages, how a website’s words are formatted through HTML, whether these words are spelled correctly and placed into grammatically correct sentences, and whether these words and the sentences they form are ever changed and updated. No argument there.
But as you can expect, content and links are only part of a much bigger and more complicated picture. In a recent interview with Search Marketing Standard Magazine, Bill Slawski, Director of Internet Marketing for Key Relevance, Inc., and author of the search-related patent blog, seobythesea.com, points out that there’s a third aspect SEO enthusiasts must pay close attention to — user-behavior-based signals. Really, “USB signals” (our own affectionate acronym) is just a slick way of saying user-website interaction, or even less fancily, user experience and use of a website. This covers the bookmarking and tagging of pages, the amount of time users spend on respective pages, how far down they scroll, user rate of subscription to RSS feeds, and of course, assigned rankings and ratings of pages that offer goods and services.
The point here is that SEO goes beyond careful selection of keywords and endless purchasing of links. A truly optimized site does indeed have substantial content and links, but it is also presentable and user-friendly, encouraging repeated and extended use. So when the SEO specialist finally wraps up his or her spiel and urges you to spend all your time and money maximizing content and links, remember that you’ve been told only about 2/3 of the story.
Google’s new Knol service
Posted by Dov Weinstock on Aug 11, 2008
This one is big news - Google has released a Beta of Knol, its new Wikipedia-like service.
As I understand it, this service is based on the idea of making the author responsible for the content. (Wikipedia’s model is that the community edits the content, with a group of moderators responsible for enforcing the rules. Other people can contribute, but it is the author who decides.
I think this is a great idea and has a lot of potential. We will be advising our clients to get involved. Bonus - initial analysis seems to indicate that Knol results get a Google Search Engine Results boost.