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Search engines play a prominent role in the contemporary Internet user experience. Businesses with websites looking to grow sales should take note. Search engines like Google drive a majority visitors to business websites while connecting users with the relevant content they are searching for online. Savvy businesses understand this and use search engine marketing to gain a competitive advantage. Search engines are critical to connecting with clients and customers searching online for information on products and services they wish to purchase.

The following How Search Works video featuring Matt Cutts, Google Search Quality Team Lead, provides an excellent overview how the Google search engine works in relatively non-technical terms. Matt specializes in search engine optimization issues and is well known in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam which impacts the relevancy of Google search results, resulting in a less positive user experience.

Matt Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google. Matt Cutts is to SEO as Ben Bernake is to Wall Street.

Video Transcript – How search works, by Matt Cutts

Hi my name is Matt Cutts I’m an engineer in the Quality Group at Google and I’d like to talk today about what happens when you do a web search.

The first thing to understand is that when you do a Google search you aren’t actually searching the web. Your searching Google’s index of the web or at least as much of it as we can find.

We do this with software programs called spiders. Spiders start by fetching a few webpages and then they follow the links on those pages and fetch the pages they point to and then follow all the links on those pages and fetch the pages they link to and so on until we’ve indexed a pretty big chunk of the web. Many billions of pages stored across thousands of machines.

Now suppose I want to know how fast the cheetah can run. I type in my search, say “cheetah running speed” and hit return. Our software searches our index to find every page that includes those search terms. In this case there are hundreds of thousands of possible results.

How does Google decide which few documents I really want? By asking questions. More than 200 of them like how many times does this page contain your keywords? Do the words appear in the title? In the URL? Directly adjacent? Does the page include synonyms for those words? Is this page from a quality website or is it low quality or even spammy? What is the pages Page Rank. That is a formula invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that rates a web page’s importance by looking at how many outside links point to it and how important those links are.

Finally, we combine all those factors together to produce each pages overall score and send you back your search results about half a second after you submit your search.

At Google we take our commitment to delivering useful and impartial search results very seriously. We don’t ever accept payment add a site to our index, update it more often or improve its ranking. Let’s take a look at my search results:

Each entry includes a title, a URL, and a snippet of text to help me decide if page has what I am looking for. I also see links to similar pages, Google’s most recent stored version of that page, and related searches that I might want try next.

And sometimes, along the right and at the top of the search results are ads. We take our advertising business very seriously as well. Both our commitment to deliver the best possible audience for advertisers, and to strive to show only ads that you want to see. We are very careful to distinguish your ads from your regular search results. And we won’t show any ads at all if we think they won’t help you find the information that you’re looking for., which in this case, the cheetah’s top running speed is more than 60 mph.

Thanks for watching this How Search Works Video and I hope this made Google and search engine marketing in general, a little more understandable.

For more information, see www.google.com/howgoogleworks.

Check out the following Interesting interview sourced from http://www.kenny.co/seo/majestic-seo where Kenny Goodman interviews Dixon Jones, an SEO verteran of 10+ years and current Marketing Director for Majestic SEO where they discuss the state of the Internet link industry and the alarming scarcity trend for  publically available, quality link information required to perform off-page SEO effectively.

In the interview, Dixon goes into detail on what’s driving the errosion of Yahoo! data, how useful the Googe data is, and exactly how Majestic SEO can help SEOs with their strategic link building campaigns. Dixon goes on to explain at a high level how Majestic SEO is acheiving its vision to be the most reliable link-data channel on the planet. Very interesting interview and definitely worth the listen.

As any SEO knows, strategic link building is the single most important factor in ranking for competive, high value search terms. For those interested in learning more about how Majestic SEO  and the free version of the Majestic SEO toos, check out the Webinar on Friday 28th January (3:00 GMT / 10:00 AM EST / 8:00 PST.)

It’s titled: “What you can get for free”, and is basically what it says on the tin: A webinar explaining how to use Majestic SEO (for free).

Click here to get more information on the webinar

Click here to sign up for the webinar

Note: eBiz ROI, Inc. currently have no affiliate relationship with Majestic SEO or Domainface besides using and benefiting from the free tools. eBiz ROI is already registered to particpate in the 28 Jan Majestic SEO webinar and hope to see other eBiz ROI readers there as well.

SEO is Hard Work

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is hard but rewarding work. SEO done right at least. Done right means employing only ethical SEO tactics, often referred to as whitehat SEO tactics. While it’s possible to achieve short-terms results using unethical SEO tactics, often referred to as blackhat SEO tactics to deceive search engines, it’s a risky approach.

How does one know if an SEO tactic is blackhat? All unethical SEO tactics are designed to deceive search engines into rating content relevancy to particular keywords higher than it really is. For instance, a blackhat seo tactic commonly used more than a decade ago when search engines were a relatvely new concept, was filling a page with repeating keywords in a font that was the same as the background color of the page, so not viewable by readers. While these blackhat SEO tactics, at the time, were effective in achieving short-term traffic results, once detected and labeled by the search engines as SPAM, the offending sites optimized with blackhat SEO tactics were in some cases temporarily blacklisted by the search engines, some banned from search results altogether.

The contemporary search engines have become more sophisticated in detecting blackhat SEO tactics, driven by maintaining relevant search results for users. To search engines, ensuring website content relevancy to search terms is their Holy Grail for maintaining and growing their search market share. Naturally, users will gravitate to search engines that deliver most relevant search results for the least amount of effort on their part. Wading through SPAM will drive search engine users to find alternative search engines with more relevant results. To search engines, loss of users means loss of search market share, resulting in lost advertising revenue. You can understand why search engines are motivated to find and punish websites that use blackhat SEO tactics.

Implementing whitehat SEO tactics is hard work which involves careful keyword research, website analysis, competitor analysis, comparison of website content to industry benchmarks, obtaining quality links from related websites. If it sounds like ethical SEO is a lot of work, it is. This is not to say that the amount of effort to implement whitehat SEO tactics is too high relative to the reward, but that caution should be used when considering short-cuts or SEO practitioners that employ them. Whitehat SEO tactics, when applied correctly, can deliver a steady stream of qualified traffic to a website for an ongoing period of time without incurring additional cost for each visitor.

In summary, when evaluating SEO practitioners, whether internal or outsourced, understand enough to ensure that Blackhat SEO tactics are not used as a shortcut to results. Evaluate tactics on the basis of whether they are designed in some way to deceive the search engines. When in doubt, great sources of additional information include the Google Webmaster Guidelines and the industry de facto SEO Code of Ethics offered to the industry and available in 19 languages.

backlinks

Hmmmm, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – simplified

The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will send authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you receive their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone exploiting the formulae that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but major press portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….