At last! There has been a Page Rank update today, the 3rd of March. Some sitse have climbed, some have lost PageRank. Google is a PR 10. So is NASA.
Yahoo, Ebay, AOL, MSN PR 9
Digg PR 8
YouTube PR 8
Amazon PR 7
Ask PR 7

SEO Must Change, and So Must Google

by Waqar Ali Shah

Search Engine Optimization is a curious term. At once, it can evoke a variety of notions, ranging from global perception management to crafty search engine manipulation. It may be appropriate to state here that almost all SEO today is straddling the boundaries of white, black and gray hat.

The term Search Engine Optimization appears to convey that SEO is about developing or managing a website’s evolution in order to make it fully realize its potential, or to make it accomplish the goal of being able to provide relevant content about its specific domain or niche, and as a corollary rank high in the relevant SERPS. The word “optimization” would have us believe that it’s really about tweaking a website to perform at an “optimal” level. This imparts an air of benignness to a field, which we shall now see, isn’t as innocuous or transparent as it may seem. Notwithstanding purely black hat techniques, even s0-called white hat SEO attempts to alter global website perception in a way that is not congruent with the wider objectives of achieving search engine results relevance.

Take link-building for example. Google calculates PageRank based on incoming links, and a higher PageRank almost always translates into better rankings for the more competitive keywords. All SEOs agree that inbound links are a major contributor to increased rankings in Google. However, these same SEOs invest time and money, which includes paying other webmasters, to create backlinks. This involvement of money betrays the fact that incoming links to a website aren’t really “votes” at all, but votes solicited through “bribes”.

Consider link building campaigns. It would be great if you could persuade owners of relevant, related websites to link to your site to actually provide real value to the end user experience. However, most link building campaigns involve outsourcing the work to a specialized party that aims to get a whole lot of links by hook or by crook. Submissions to directories are perfectly legitimate, however. But sneaking links into unsuspecting websites such as comment-enabled blogs or wikis is not. And from Google’s perspective, neither is paying someone to link to a website. If an incoming link is a vote, as Google would have us believe, then by all means, paying to get votes is an unethical practice. This can be called artificial link building, or to put it bluntly, bribing. Link building practices, then, are really skewing the cherished ideal of the highly relevant search experience.

What is Google really doing to combat artificial link building, especially sneaky campaigns executed over a longer period of time in order to appear natural or organic? Google seems to be at a loss as to how best to combat this widespread, growing practice. If link votes can be manipulated by link-building campaigns that can pretty much guarantee you links(or votes, depending on how you perceive it) in return for money, then PageRank cannot be an effective indicator of relevance based on links/votes.

Then we have self-proclaimed SEOs openly advocating search engine manipulation by offering spammy automatic content generation tools that can guarantee you tens of thousands of pages. For example, we have bluehatseo.com offering ways to rapidly set up huge websites based on largely nonsensical content that will inevitably attract a lot of irrelevant traffic. Whether or not this is ethical is debatable, but what is obvious is that search engines must catch up with these devious promoters of irrelevant content that are swamping cyberspace.

There is something hugely disturbing about the fact that major search engines such as Google continue to be so easily manipulated by deft webmasters. In a recent case study I happened to come across, a mortgage solutions website generated nearly 15 million backlinks using link exchanges masquerading as permanent links. The website continues to occupy the top rank for extremely competitive keywords in what is clearly a bewildering example of black hat SEO tolerated well by Google.

Something about SEO has to change, and fast, for it to truly become a reflection of website relevance. Search engines such as Google must modify their algorithms to mitigate the effects of manipulative practices such as automatic content creation and sustained, paid artificial link building (not just rapid link building as is currently being dealt with). This must be done, even if it involves drastically changing Google’s existing algorithms - including PageRank - or replacing them altogether.

SEO and Niches

What is a niche? Or more specifically, what is an Internet or Web niche? And how does it relate to SEO? We’ve all heard a lot about how important it is to find the correct niche for Internet-based businesses. This question has been raised on Digital Point and other forums multiple times now, prompting me to attempt to answer this in the most intuitive way possible.

The literal meaning of a niche is a cove, or slit. Ever heard of a niche in the bark of a tree? Its importance lies in its confinement; its very definition implies the act of limiting. This means that your niche should be something specific and well-defined. The niche you choose for your business should be something for which there is demand in the world, and which preferably isn’t being served in the best way possible. You fill that gap.

This brings us to keyword gap analysis. Keyword gaps refer to subjects being searched unsatisfactorily. In other words, websites that can adequately serve search needs for a particular keyword simply do not exist. If you can create the information and serve it to the needy, you will have filled that keyword gap. This in turn creates a niche for your new website or online business. In this way, keyword gaps and niches are interrelated. More on this later, so stay tuned!

Contextual Relevance

We all think we know what relevance means. It is the importance or relation of an object to a particular issue or paradigm. What is contextual relevance, however, especially with regards to the Web? This is about taking relevance to a whole new level.

The Merriam Webster dictionary has updated its definition of relevance to include “the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user”

The idea of contextual relevance imparts multiple dimensions to the notion of relevance. This is of profound importance in the age of cyberspace and electronic semantics. One thing that may be relevant in one context, may not be relevant in another. In the case of the Web, this means that a web page that is relevant to one specific keyword may not be relevant to another keyword. While this may seem to be obviously true, it also implies that apparently unrelated pages may be relevant to a particular keyword or search, even if they appear to contain a lesser concentration of that particular keyword, or even if they provide less information about the topic that is apparently searched. Now you might be wondering how something containing less information could actually be more important?

It can - this is where contextual relevance comes in. We know that a good web page is about more than just keywords. It actually has to make sense and provide value to the user. However, just making sense or providing valuable information about those keywords is not enough. It must provide information about a subject that has a higher probability of satisfying user search requirement.

When a searcher looks for information about a particular search term, he/she is presented with a variety of different search results that contain his queried keywords in different concentrations and configurations. One result may contain a keyword x number of times, another result may contain the same keyword y number of times, etc.

However, web pages that contain the highest number of keywords in the search results may not necessarily be the most desirable from the searcher’s point of view. What the searcher needs is something that best serves their need, regardless of the amount of information that is relevant to their keywords. Sound confusing? Read on, it won’t be!

Contextual relevance is the relevance of a piece of information, such as a web page, to a particular issue or subject at hand. A search for a herbal supplement, milk thistle, for example, may result in a number of web pages about antioxidants. However, milk thistle will be more relevant in the context of liver disease than anything else. A good search engine will keep liver disease related search results near the top of the SERP in a search about milk thistle.

Another way to describe contextual relevance would be relative relevance. It all boils down to subjective intuition and the increased ability of search engines such as Google to attach intelligent semantic reasoning to keywords and associated web pages. Remember, keywords don’t matter if they are not relevant, and relevance won’t matter much without contextual relevance.

Why we love Google

Search engines in general, and Google in particular, have one primary purpose: to enable the worldwide audience of the Web to find the information they need. While directories are large repositories of information indexed and categorized, search engines go beyond indexing to intelligently providing a user the best possible information that would serve their particular search need.

This is why search engines are infinitely more powerful than directories: they save time and effort. You type in a word and the answer comes up instantly. This comes at a price, however. The search engines must collect maintain extensive metadata about various websites and corresponding queries and keywords.

Effective website ranking is also crucial to a search engine’s performance. If they wouldn’t return relevant results immediately, in practice on the first immediately viewable page(though this could change with AJAX and other rich media interfaces), what different would a search engine be from a directory? Both would require extensive browsing. Hence the need of the ranked hierarchy of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Google is the world’s most widely used search engine. Although people in at least two major countries, China and Russia, prefer to use other search engines that are more popular there than Google, the vast majority of the English speaking world, including the UK, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, as well as Asian countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh use Google as their primary search engine. Google also supports other languages such as Arabic, and virtually all the European languages. India and Pakistan boast a variety of regional languages, and Google has support for almost all major ones. A user in India, for example, would be as at ease searching in Tamil as he would be searching in English.

Google created a niche for itself by making use of incoming hyperlinks, or backlinks as they are often referred to, for assigning weightage to webpages. This is called PageRank. What people don’t know, however, is that Google uses more than hyperlinks to calculate the relative importance of a web page. Google utilizes a plethora of services, including intelligent software systems and human web page reviewers, to contribute toward an accurate understanding of web pages’ inherent value to the user, generating a truly relevant search engine index that concentrates more on the end user above anything else.

The value that Google provides to the online search experience is truly unparalleled. The most relevant results are returned early in the SERP, and Google has been very successful at creating a largely accurate hierarchy of web-pages, giving rise to relative or contextual relevance. Determining what is relevant, and where, is now the job of the search engine, a task that Google is living up to nicely. These are only some of the reasons the world loves Google. As the Internet becomes the most extensive, widely used library, repository and knowledge base, search engines will become the key to unlocking this valuable resource.

Intense Relevance

The New SEO Paradigm

Forget generating backlinks and submissions to zillions of mindless directories. As search engines get increasingly smarter and the new Web is gradually more humanized than ever before, search engine optimization is now a whole new ball game.

The key to a successful SEO strategy is to actually be as human as possible. Don’t think of a search engine as a cold, calculating nasty robot. Think of it as a human librarian, or a literary critic. The reason for this is that search engines are consistently improving their semantic processing and are learning to think more and more like the way we humans do.

Additionally, we know that one specific search engine, Google, uses a team of hundreds of human website reviewers to vet through thousands of websites in an effort to produce a truly relevant, competent web index. This is important, because the whole purpose of search engines is to get the searcher to exactly what they want, filtering through piles of irrelevant information that may well be relevant elsewhere.

What SEO now means is to generate exceptionally relevant content. Intense relevance is now key to a successful digital marketing strategy, to make sure you produce exactly what your target audience needs, and that you keep your web page coherent, your content concise and limited to the context at hand. This is important, because extending your subject matter to include more ideas and information will dilute the perceived importance of your page to the subject at hand, thereby harming your search engine ranking with regards to that particular subject or keyword(s).

Intense relevance means that you go out of your way to ensure that:

1. You have a well defined target audience for a particular web page
2. You take a web page at a time, recognizing its unitary value independent of the website
3. Ensure that the information you present in your webpage does justice to its title
4. Ensure the title does justice to the information within the page
5. Ensure congruence of all page elements, including title, meta description, the body of the document, and the captions within.
6. Finally, you ensure that the facts you present actually provide value to the reader. This could be a new twist on prevoiusly existing information, or could help a reader learn something entirely new.

What about links? We do know that Google counts incoming links to contribute to PageRank. Our answer: DON’T waste your time on them, because they’ll come naturally when you write valuable content that people love and want others to read. When it comes to SEO, it’s largely a self fulfilling prophecy: quality content will lead you there.

You’ve probably heard of the expression “Content is King”. This is all the more relevant in today’s e-business world, where your search engine rankings are determined primarily by what information you have to offer. An effective content provision campaign is central to the success of your business, whether it is online or offline.

While myopic SEO practitioners may lay emphasis on traditional techniques such as building more low quality backlinks, linking to highly ranked websites and new ways to generate traffic, more and more people are learning about the benefits to be derived from unique, strategically placed content.

The Web has entered into a profound new era, whereby powerful Internet technologies are readily available and the onus is now on the mind behind the machine to create innovative services. Quality of content is now the single most important factor determining the audience and popularity of a website. Keywords, theme and subject are fast becoming redundant as search engines such as Google are becoming more and more intelligent, learning to pick up articles of substance that can truly influence a particular niche.

The Web 2.0 paradigm can now be viewed as a great Enabler, giving more and more people the power to share their unique creative abilities. While the technology itself is essential, of critical importance is the content that you actually make available to the audience. SEO techniques are widely available, thereby increasing competition, whereas content is unique and cannot be usually reproduced without author consent. With the new Web infrastructure reducing learning curves, excellence in content generation is the primary factor determining both search engine rankings and popularity. With superior copywriting services at your disposal, organic SEO is the way to go! Copywriting Experts are there to mentor you at every step of the way.