SEOIs This Really Necessary?

TOC• The Problem: Brief history of search• The Solution: How Google works• Why We Care: Findability• SEO: Making a Good Impression

1.Why search exists

In the beginning there were documents.

Then there was the World Wide Web.

Then there was a problem.

2.How Google works

(sort of)

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google’s Mission Statement

Google does 3 things

Crawls Indexes RanksDiscover new pages Parse documents and

create keyword indexes

Assign rank using special sauce algorithms

PageTitle

URL

Last Modified Date

Domain

Backlinks

Content

. . .

Indexing: Each page gets a record

PageTitle

URL

Last Modified Date

Domain

Backlinks

Content

. . .

DomainAuthority

Backlinks

Age

. . .

BacklinksPages

Link Text

Domains

. . .

Indexing: Pages relate to other records

Termapple

giraffe

celery

dinosaur

camera

Documents3, 5, 11, 89

3, 34, 88

1, 5, 8, 52, 76

10, 24

41, 44, 91

Indexing: Inverted Index

http://searchengineland.com/seotable

3.Why this matters to us

Findability

Findability is a term for the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website (using search engines and the like) and by users already on the website.

Wikipedia, The Internet (2012)

Search Patterns, Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender (2010)

A lot has to line up for this to work.

Findability prerequisites1. Google has to be able to find our content.

2. Google has to value our content.

3. Our content has to align with the search keywords used by potential visitors.

4. Our content has to promote itself (Microcontent).

Findability• Better findability = greater readership

• Findability is a core quality of online content

• Users find content in various ways but (for now) search is the dominant discovery channel

Findability is bigger than search optimization.

Our writers are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.

Scott Havens, Senior Vice President, The Atlantic Media Company

It’s not about optimizing for search engines.

It’s about optimizing for findability.

4.What we can do

Speak the user’s language

“Speak the user's language” has been a primary usability guideline for more than 20 years. The fact that the Web is a linguistic environment further increases the importance of using the right vocabulary.

Jakob Nielsen, Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (2006)

KeywordsKeywords are what users type into the search box.

Keywords represent the specific language and terminology that people use when they search for things.

Search is about matching.

Matching is about tuning.

The goal is to optimize content for findability by fine-tuning our language to

match the language used by our audience.

Microcontent

“Microcontent needs to be pearls of clarity: you get 40-60 characters to explain your macrocontent. Unless the title or subject make it absolutely clear what the page or email is about, users will never open it.”

Jakob Nielsen

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici

(50 characters)

What constitutes a good title on the web is different from what constitutes a good

title in print.

The print reading experience is immersed in context.

What Google sees

<h1>

Past, Present, Future

</h1>

Often, this is all a user sees:

At most, there’s an excerpt:

Titles on the web have to do more work.

Final thought

We’re talking about making our content robot-friendly.

But remember what the robots are trying to do...

...they’re trying to figure out what humans value.

The robots are just the middlemen.

At the end of the day we’re still writing for humans.

Great content is the best SEO strategy.

Questions?• Email: rob@ravelrumba.com• Twitters: @robflaherty