Search Engine Optimization

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The most important measure of a search engine is the quality of its search results.

“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

Here’s a link to Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s thesis paper. It is an excellent view into the minds of the founders of Google and how they sought to fix what was then a not so obvious problem.

For our purposes, creating a search optimization strategy with a positive return on investment will ultimately include tactics from the following four buckets:

  1. Research: Determine which keywords strike the right balance between:
    • Volume and trends – Does they keyword have sufficient traffic to make a long term commitment to it? Is that traffic trending up, will the investment get better, over time?
    • Relevancy – If someone were to click on a search result for their term, are they going to find what they’re looking for?
    • Intent – Does the keyword convey buying intent, or are they just looking for free information?
  2. On-page: Create content that users want to find and ensure the keywords that have been uncovered in your research important to you are contained in places like title, description, alt tags, body copy, etc.
  3. Performance: Constantly improve the user experience for your site’s visitor, and even if your page is not often visited from a mobile device work to make the mobile experience better. This means faster load times and mobile optimized content.
  4. Off-page: Increase in inbound links to the site’s content from high quality sites. This can often be an extension of a press outreach effort, focused more on industry related blogs.