That’s right, it takes search engines roughly a quarter of a second to retrieve, rank and return a list of websites to you that are the most relevant to your search. That’s pretty impressive, even more impressive when you consider the billions and billions of pages that exist on the Web.

You may be really curious about how it all works. You’re curious not only because they deliver such impressive results, but because as someone interested in search marketing, you want to know how your own content can achieve visibility in search results.

In order to fully understand how search engines manage this feat, it is helpful to briefly look at how the Web is laid out.

The Web consists of many billions of pages. Each of these pages has a unique URL, content (text, pictures, video) and links that connect them to other pages. One page connects to another, which connects to another and so on and so on. This set up creates a huge “web” of interconnected pages.

Crawling – Indexing – Retrieving – Ranking

Crawling pages is done by search engine automated robots, commonly referred to as “spiders”, and is one of the main functions of a search engine. The spiders “read” one page and then follow any links from that page to another page. Through links the spiders can reach billions of interconnected documents.

Indexing is the process by which search engines select pieces of relevant code (including keywords and surrounding text) from the web page and catalog them. They store that code and related information organized in massive data centers that are located all around the world. This is no small task.

Retrieving comes into play when a search engine user types in a keyword or a string of keywords. The search engine goes into action retrieving all of the urls that it has stored which are relevant to the keyword and returns this information to the user.

Ranking of web pages is essential for the satisfaction of the user’s query. Search engines rank each web page that they find according to things like trust factors, page rank and even go as far as considering the user’s search history and where they are geographically. Hundreds of factors are weighted and considered by the engine in concert with one another. This is what constitutes the search engine’s algorithm.

The goal of the search engine is to have an understanding about what all web pages are about, and return the pages that are most relevant and rank them in the order of perceived importance.

Then, you may ask, what is the goal of a search marketer? Setting up a web page so it is easily “read” by search engine spiders, creating relevant content that adds importance to the page and linking to and from other pages are all areas that search marketing focuses on in order to increase ranking. Ranking, and it the visibility that comes with it, is however only a small piece of effective inbound marketing and an overall owned media strategy.

Bitter much? You bet.

One of the things that we did at the ISP for some of our business class clients (after building web sites and setting up local area networks for their offices) was Search Engine Submission. Before Google had established the dominance that it currently has and before crawling technologies had become as sophisticated as they have today, engines relied on Webmasters submitting their content to be indexed in manual fashion – page by page.

The economy of many engines as opposed to three (and really just two) having majority market share dictates a very different strategy to ubiquitous search engine presence. Fancy speak to say – fewer engines, more focused attention.

Modern engines, as you’re no doubt familiar with, use a much more sophisticated and all-inclusive methodology for indexing the world’s online content – they go out and find it. And the method which engines use to go out and find that content also influences the order in which it is displayed to us peons (i.e. links influence rankings).

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This being a story that comes from 12 years ago, you can imagine our nostalgic ire when a marketing company maintains a core SEO service offering of ‘Search Engine Submission.’ I could go into all sorts of detail as to why those very words irk me, but suffice to say -  using those terms in a services description is direct evidence that the person writing it has no understanding of the way a modern search engine works, and is not qualified to offer said services.

</Rant>

We believe that any conversation about internet marketing that does not start and finish with the audience of your company or product is the wrong conversation. Too often business professionals are lead to believe that the holy grail in search is filled with rankings and traffic. Wrong. The holy grail is a lifetime customer found through those rankings. Fine line you say? Perhaps in conversation, but in function it’s a huge chasm that can define either success or failure.

Andrew Gouty
CEO – Rella SEO

Taking the search information from billions of global searches and breaking it down into manageable bites is in the beginning of SEO strategy. The following is a list of categories followed by the percentage of total monthly searches they receive (circa 2008 comScore data). This chart gives you an idea of where your website fits within the 100′s of millions of searches performed every day.

Disheartened that your specific business isn’t listed or isn’t in the top 5? Don’t be – the point of macro data in SEO doesn’t mean that no one searches for what you have to offer – quite the opposite.

You can use this information a few different ways. You may simply want to see where your website already fits into search markets. One might also take this information and use it to influence content strategy to take advantage of the behaviors already exhibited by search engine users.

This consistent behavior is altered, however, when image thumbnails and maps are introduced. In fact, the appearance of map images on a SERP results in a lot more
activity devoted to the map, and the appearance of image thumbnails seems to draw even more user attention. It has been shown that this attention to image thumbnails can draw more eyes then the top text organic results space, even when the images are towards the bottom of the SERP.

The landscape of SERPs is changing and, according to eye tracking results, search marketers need to keep those changes in mind. Landing your website organically
into the highest possible spot of the 10 page positions used to guarantee more impressions. This was because the natural ‘F’ eye pattern encompassed those
positions.

With the introduction of more and more blended search results SEOs must consider not only page position but also multimedia listings are drawing eyes away. Blended search results show not only text but videos, images, maps and now social integration through Google Plus and Facebook, depending on you engine of preference.

How has Rella responded? With increased focus on search verticals which are more fitting to user intent, but have the greatest likelihood of achieving visibility that will result in clicks.

How often do I have to go to the gym?

As long as you want to be fit against your competition.

The word ‘competition’ is the most key in the sentence. It’s common that SEO campaigns are focused internally:

1. What are we doing wrong?
2. How can we better optimize?
3. Can we be more active online?

When realistically, it might be more prudent to look at the distance between you and your top-level competition, and judge appropriate activities on the distance to where you’re going. We all know the story of the boy scouts who set across a snowy field in pursuit of the most direct path. The small boy who set his eyes on a tree in the distance had the most direct path. In this metaphor, replace the tree with a competitor outpacing you in online presence, and determine high quality activities to pursue which position you as comparable or better in the eyes of your target market.

Sounds simple, right? When in reality, taking a look at current tactics and making the hard choices of what to grow and what to diminish can be territorial, political, and downright messy depending on who is involved. The important thing to remember about your competition is they want to rank higher than you and are potentially pursuing activities to do so. So when considering activities pursuant to SEO, it may be a more serious commitment than you would originally consider. Make sure you allot a budget that you can sink your teeth into on an annual basis. One-off rounds of “optimization” may have initial impacts, and are typically insufficient to tackle any meaningful channels of inbound traffic.

All conspiracy theories aside (read the NY Times article if you haven’t already), the JC Penney story has brought a plethora of questions about the common SEO practice of link building – which is the practice of creating links pointing from other websites to your own. This practice, when done over time, can improve a web site’s ‘authority’ on a particular or many topics.

The logic followed by Google and its algorithm is this: when you produce quality content, other sites and people with link to your content. The more links you have from other authority sites, the more likely your site is to the have the best content in your particular industry or subject matter.

It gets more complicated than that, but in essence, SEO companies have begun offering and exacting link building campaigns on behalf of their clients. In short, SEO companies are paid to build up the authority of their client’s web site on a particular topic. It can be likened to a PR campaign, where the media outlets are blogs, forums, article directories and other web sites.

Following the manual intervention done by Google to rectify the situation brought to light about JC Penney, many SEOs began a reactionary debate claiming that “link building is a dead practice.” And “it’s time to reevaluate your link building strategy.”

Both of these things are true if you (as an SEO or SEO company’s client) had engaged in strategies which

A) paid for links (against Google’s TOS)
B) built spammy links

At each juncture where Google and Bing respond to spam or questionable SEO practices, I applaud them. Why? Because the changes they make tend to have a positive effect or no effect on our client results. I would be worried if Google took no action, or completely rearranged the nature of their algorithm to devalue links completely.

“So what do you expect search engines to do?”

I expect them to get better at incorporating user feedback into ranking algorithms. Google Plus is currently the forefront example on people’s mind, and I expect search engines to get more sophisticated about what they weigh to judge the quality of content in their index, and better help cream rise to the top.

I fully expect the day to day operations of Rella SEO to change in coming years, but the intent of our activities will likely remain – achieve visibility for our clients where their customers are likely to make a purchase.

Thankfully there is a straight-forward process to accomplish this. More than just “keyword research” – our Discovery can identify how SEO fits into your sales funnel, and ultimately how it will affect your bottom line.

The following video explains this ROI determination process at a high level…