SEO in one easy lesson

All of Search Engine Optimization is divided into three parts (not two, as most "experts" would have you believe. The first two are:

 

On Page Optimization - Things you do to a Web page to make it more readable for Search Engines.

 

Off Page Optimization - Everyone tells you this means adding backlinks from other Web sites. They mean Off Site Optimization.

 

So now you've got your content and your backlinks. What is missing?

 

Website SEO design - That's all the things you do to Web site structure to make your site better, and it probably includes things like setting up newsletters and the like.

 

Read those three articles and you have a pretty good idea of the basics of SEO.

 

Ami Isseroff

Wikipedia introduces the "no-follow" tag

Wikipedia has introduced a rel = "nofollow" tag that is evidently used on all outbound links. This was evidently done to reduce link spam that is part of Black Hat SEO. However it is applied indiscriminately to all links, including those on which the articles are based, which makes it somewhat unethical. What it will mean is that the gigantic volunteer encyclopedia which Google lists as #1 for so many keywords will perpetuate and increase its web dominance at the expense of other Web sites. It means that nobody but Wikipedia can be number 1 for an informational keyword niche. At least in theory there could be an excellent article, much better than Wikipedia's for a given subject at a different Web site, but it will never exceed Wikipedia in the listings because no site is probably going to have more pages and authority than Wikipedia. This shows an important weakness of Google PageRank which bases authority and positioning on the number of backlinks

Search quality: How good is Google?

Yesterday I wrote about Google Quality Rater Secrets - how Google uses humans to rate its search engine results. Improving the quality of search engine results was the aim of the original search engine and ranking algorithm described by the Google founders in The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.

Google has brought search engine quality a long way since then. But I did a little experiment which shows that Google's results are, by its own standards, not nearly as good as they ought to be or could be.

More at  The Quality of Google Search Results