SEO Book
We are very happy to be releasing our SEO Book for free today. It aims to contain more facts, and less snake oil, than the existing literature. [Download As PDF] (~418kb) Or view chapters on our website: Why SEO is important The Limits of a Search Engine How Search Engine’s work Search Engine Ranking Factors Detecting Spam & Manipulation An Example SEO...
read more6 An Example SEO Campaign
Now we’ve covered the theory, its time for a real world example of putting it into practice. Company Profile John runs a driving school in Springfield, Ohio. He has a website he has owned for a couple of years, that ranks around the second page for most searches related to driving schools in Ohio and receives about 20 visitors day, a third from search engines and two thirds from links from local websites. A quick search for what he imagines would be his main keyword, “driving school Springfield Ohio”, has a company directory site at the top followed by other directories,...
read more5 Detecting Spam & Manipulation
You will often hear that your site has to look “natural” to the search engines. Just what “natural” means is hard to define, but essentially it means the profile of a site whose popularity was never engineered or promoted, and was instead based on people luckily coming across it and deciding to recommend it to their friends with links. Whats more, you also need to make your site look “popular”, creating no links to your site yourself will look “natural” but you will have no chance of competing with people who do unless you have the cash to buy large amounts of advertising....
read more4 Search Engine Ranking Factors
Google engineers update their algorithms daily. They then run many tests to check they have the right balance between all these factors. The following is from an interview with Google’s Udi Manber: Q: How do you determine that a change actually improves a set of results? A: We ran over 5,000 experiments last year. Probably 10 experiments for every successful launch. We launch on the order of 100 to 120 a quarter. We have dozens of people working just on the measurement part. We have statisticians who know how to analyze data, we have engineers to build the tools. We have at least 5...
read more3 How Search Engines Work
History of Search Engines The first mechanised information retrieval sysyems were built by the US military to analyse the mass of documents being captured from the Germans. Research was boosted when the UK and US governments funded research to reduce a perceived “science gap” with the USSR. By the time the internet was becoming commonplace in the early 1990s information retrieval was at an advanced stage. Complicated methods, primarily statistical, had been developed an archives of thousands of documents could be searched in seconds. Web search engines are a special case of information...
read more2 The Limits of a Search Engine
There are some very specific limits in computer science as to what a computer program is capable of doing, and these have direct consequences for how search engines can index and rank your web pages. The two core sets or problems are NP-Complete problems, which for large sets of data take too long to solve perfectly, and AI-Complete problems, which can’t be done perfectly until we have computers that are intelligent as people. That doesn’t mean search engines can’t make approximations, for example finding the shortest route on a map is a NP-Complete problem yet Google maps...
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