By Avinash Agrawal
I’ve written a bit more on technical ways to improve search engine ranking with some tables here.
But have you ever thought that there are other things you can do? Maybe something around web searching that doesn’t require change? Or something around web searching that simply happens more often than we think? I can see that there’s some surprising things you can do to improve search ranking with some simple changes in your web search behaviors.
How Search Engines Settle Against Data (And Why SEO Fails Against It)
Let’s look at how we get here. Search engine optimization was created mostly to surface a high-value set of websites on users’ results. Traditionally this is based on ranking for “higher quality” and ranked sites are more likely to be read and shared. But back in 2013 Google revealed to CEO Larry Page that it was not an exact science. Search engines have to implement filtering mechanisms, and it’s not like there is one algorithm that pulls all of the strings. And search marketers especially are very crafty about how to do business.
The main formula to SEO, designed around traditional SEO (Figure 2 below) assumes that websites with high indexed content are more likely to be read and shared. Certainly, high-quality content can be a gateway to new customers and users. But we don’t yet know exactly how much of that traffic actually ends up coming from the quality of a website. Search engines use a bidding model to reward and to rank content sites. This tends to favor websites which attract the most clicks and incoming visitors, which could translate to higher monetization.
Another popular model, also centered around looking for high-value websites, uses what is often referred to as “content and context.” It seems quite clear that any page that hosts information that appears in context is likely to have a higher chance of being read by users. So, maybe this isn’t the key, but it might influence the process. Right now content is still emphasized, but there are other pieces of search that other websites have not been tuned to favor. Or, instead they have been optimized to provide high quality content.
If you want to optimize for some other ranking for search, try targeting high-value sites in a different way. Instead of looking for a great website with content to fill in content that needs to be caught between two walls.
Did you know that there are ways to use your web search to find information? Your web search becomes a piece of your blog in this fashion. If you use your search patterns to highlight and highlight blog posts that cater to your niche, you can boost your blog SEO score. Here’s an example of how Google favors content which taps into a particular niche — again, both articles and blog posts that are relevant to your blog.
Figure 3: Google’s top 5 ranked blog posts in 2011
Finally, discover other resources and blogs online (something Google has helped with in a number of ways through its algorithm). As our knowledge expands with the technology we use, more insights will be gleaned from that.
The marketer, so often told that there is no way for marketers to improve SEO, has no choice but to focus on other tactics. Yet, given that there are multiple metrics that affect SEO decisions and that those related to content have been evolving at the same time, SEO marketers have been able to see SEO results slowly as a whole.
Now, if I may add: if SEO is an art, then marketing is a science.
Related: Your Search Engine Content Is Equivalent to a Sales Pitch