Where SEO Began?
In early 1999, I was elected president of the Sacramento Cisco Users Group just
shortly after I wrote my third Cisco Certification book. The users group was dedicated to
getting its members certifications, access to training on routers, switches, and using
hardware to give better quality of service (QoS) to the local networks and web servers.
Just a year later the users group had over 1,000 members and people would arrive
from the Bay Area which was a two hour drive to attend the meetings. If you have been in
the computer industry for any length of time I am sure you can remember the Y2K issue
and after the fear subsided many IT experts were looking for other careers. Many were
focused on creating web servers and using Cisco devices to make the high traffic websites
accessible across multiple servers. This kept the user’s web experiences fast and friendly
but also eliminated a point of failure. If one of the web servers failed another one was
there to keep the website up.
Yahoo! AltaVista, and AOL were the primary search engines at the time. As
members in the group started to learn HTML and creating websites they started to ask
what, “How do we do so well with the search engines?” One of the early speakers at the
group was Mike Monahan from Excite, then later Lycos. He was responsible for creating
algorithms and keeping SPAM off the first few pages of the search results.
It pretty easy to tank back then. Add some good Meta tags and put the words on
the page which you wanted to be found for. Back then it was really that simple to optimize
your website. There was a second part and that was to submit your
website Development to all the
search engines one by one manually by using their submission URL’s to submit your
website over and over until each search engine started looking at your website.
In the year 2000, I was also teaching Cisco and Microsoft certification classes in
Plano, Texas. The topic we were discussing was brought up about a group I represented in
the Sacramento area whose main goal was to market to the search engines. Questions
were asked by the attendees on what we did and the different topics we addressed. One of
the members of the group was Ted Nugent, who at the time was an editor for the quite
popular PC Computing magazine.
A few weeks after the class was over I received a call from Ted about wanting me
to write an article which explained what was needed to be done in HTML to get your
website to be found by the search engines especially Yahoo! and Excite which were the
most popular at the time.
That article was published in November of 2000 and was titled “Optimizing Your
Website for Search Engines”. Soon that article was copied, rewritten and posted all over
the world. More people have made minor changes to that article and called it theirs than I
think any other article ever posted on the Internet. Today most every book and text on
Internet history credits me with starting the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
which was first used in that article. Had I only known how popular it would become at the
time and I had the forethought to get the domain name “SEO.COM”.
In the year 2001 I started doing SEO for my first client’s websites and every year
since I have written a book to update my friends and colleagues on search engine
optimization. Since 2001 there has never been a year where there have not been more
changes to how you need to optimize your website than the previous year. This year I
think was the most challenging and has the most number of changes. Not only that I have
some insight in to what changes will be coming in 2017.
SEO now encompasses not just what is on your pages but what you do off-page for
your website (on the Internet). This has changed so much in just the past year as well.
This includes social media, link building, and what you need to do to make your website
look as though or become an authority in your industry has changed so much as well.
NOTE: Link building has not gone away regardless of what Google has said or
stated publically and I can prove it. I will speak more about that later in this
book.
What’s New In 2016
The biggest changes and what’s new for 2016? Well this year it will be
impossible to do SEO without a mobile website. You need to think of Google as more
than one search engine because mobile devices now have their own search results.
Second biggest? Well I might have some who think the new Artificial Intelligence
Algorithm called RankBrain should have been first. RankBrain appears to be a product of
a 2014 acquisition by Google of a company called DeepMind. I will cover this new
algorithm extensively in the first chapter.
Third biggest? Well it is a combination of Google Author, Rich Snippets,
Semantic Markup, Data Highlighting and great content. If you have never heard of these
terms you better get used to them because they are not so new and they are here to stay
and you won’t rank very well this year without them.
This last year has been a never ending battle for ranking position and this battle
believe it or not is getting hotter for 2016. Google is both a friend and a foe for businesses
using the Internet to market their products or services. To compete, businesses must
utilize SEO or die for the most part. Especially since many who were doing SEO have
given up and just gone to Pay-Per-Click (PPC). This avenue though is based on an
auction system and made so the highest positions in PPC go to those willing to pay the
most. It is getting more and more expensive. The more players there are the worse it
gets.
The cost per click is raising faster than the cost of raw materials and eating more
and more in to a company’s profits. The cost for one click for the word “Microsoft”? It
just reached $45. Local searches for the keyword “DUI Attorney” have gone past $20.00
a click in some markets.
I have seen so many businesses this past year that relied on PPC instead of SEO
take a fall and go out of business. I have also seen businesses who were doing PPC and
concentrated money on their SEO have a windfall. You always want to do PPC but
concentrate more of your money on SEO as it garners better results for the cost over
time. People click on organic results 8 times more than PPC. Why do they click on
organic results? Because they usually get more relevant information. Anyone can put an
ad out on Pay-Per-Click if they are willing to pay for it.
Chapter 1 – SEO
When people come up to me when I am speaking at shows or other book signing
events, they many times ask me “What is SEO?” I quickly reply, “No one uses the
telephone book anymore, right?” At this point I usually get a nod “yes”. Then I continue,
“People use Google, Bing or Yahoo! as their telephone book.” Then I go on, “If your
company’s website is not on the first page of Google, Bing, or Yahoo! for a search for
your product or service, you are either losing a lot of business or your business is going to
fail. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the exact science to get your website up on
page 1 of a search. If your website is on page two or later for the keywords that define
your product or service, you are invisible on the Internet.”
Almost every company now has a website but less than 5% know of Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) or use as part of their company’s marketing plan. This is a huge
mistake the the bottom line. One of the largest Internet statistics organizations in the
world is AccuQuality.com. In their August of 2015 Internet Usage Report it reported that
those companies who use professional SEO services garner over 72% of all clicks on the
Internet. So if SEO is not part of your marketing plan it should be. Those using PPC
gained a mere 11.2% of the clicks. Only 2% of the 4 billion business websites out there
got traffic from search engines that didn’t pay for it with PPC or use SEO. Most of those
have good brand names and have been around for many years. Another interesting new
statistic this year is that over 35% of all sales online come from mobile devices. This is
pretty interesting as it is almost an 18% jump in four years.
NOTE: Statistics from AccuQuality.com report used with signed permission
statement.
To do SEO right you now need to also remember to utilize Google and Bing’s
Webmaster Tools as well as Google Analytics. These tools have all changed and been
made extremely useful tools with many monitoring and notification features.
As I said earlier, the Internet is now the telephone book and as a business you have to
adapt and not only adapt well, but one up your competitors so your website URL comes
up at the top of the list in any keyword search. No longer can you just pay $2,500 a month
for a full page ad in a telephone book to stand out. You have to do the equivalent on the
Internet. Your website has to stand out in the center of 4 billion other business websites
and outshine all the other competitors in your industry to be successful.
My website looks better than my competition! I’m good, right?
Good SEO does not really care about the look and feel of your website for the most
part. You want to have a great looking website but you have to incorporate about 150
different coded items that Google and the other search engines look for and the list grows
every year. The coding behind the look of your website is actually more important to the
search engines than what your visitors see when they come for a visit. That’s why some
of the ugliest websites make the first page of Google. It really boils down to a task of
marketing your website not only to your customers but to the search engines as well.
Search Engine Algorithms
First off, many people do not know what a search engine algorithm is. Another mistake
is thinking Google has just one algorithm when it is actually many. Each algorithm has a
specific task to perform. An algorithm is basically a program that is made to filter data and
provide or changes based on the results.
Sidebar: How do search engines collect information on
websites?
Search engines and Google collect information on every website
using little programs called bots, crawlers, or spiders. These little
programs have visited virtually every website on the Internet to collect
information on every one of them. These little programs collect
keywords, phrases, links, and other coding located on every
website. It then stores this information in huge databases used by the
search engines to apply filters called algorithms. A virtual copy of
almost every publically available website worldwide can be found
in these search engine databases.
To make it easy to understand, imagine that you have a list in an Excel document and it
contained 5,000 names and you only wanted to know the names in the list that had the last
name of Smith. You could write a small program that found only the name Smith and
displayed those entries with only that name. That is a basic algorithm. Now Google’s
algorithms are much more complex and the amount of data it has to filter is almost
unimaginable but each algorithm Google runs has a specific task and changes displayed
results differently.
In 2015, Google used many new algorithm changes to shake things up. Each algorithm
has a specific purpose or filter. Let’s take a look at some of the Google Algorithms in
recent history that really shook things up. Let’s take a look at these major algorithms in
the next few sections.
Skynet RankBrain Algorithm
Have you ever seen many of the movies or TV shows where humans try to make
robots as smart as people and then the robots try to take over? One of my favorites is the
Cylon’s from the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Killer robots.
Well from the reaction of the SEO community you would have thought that the
Cylon’s were attacking us when Google announced that they were implementing what
they are calling the RankBrain Algorithm in my many of the searches Google performs.
In 2014 Google acquired an artificial intelligence company called Deep Mind and
this appears to be its first attempt at using some of that newly acquired technology in to
searches.
So Google came up with a machine that they are calling Artificial Intelligence(AI) that
they think has the ability to learn and understand colloquial human speech. Google’s new
ranking factor is called Skynet RankBrain. In early attempts with AI the machines the
machines struggled with being able to figure out the nuances of the human language. The
new RankBrain AI is able to use complex long-tail context clues such as the user’s
location to understand the searcher’s actual intent to deliver more relevant results.
So how do we optimize for RankBrain?
For those SEO Writers and webmasters out there. Fear not. RankBrain isn’t going
to drastically change how you create your content or much how you change what you are
doing with design. That is if you are following Google’s Webmaster guidelines and best
practices. There are some steps that you can take to ensure that your website content is
ready for Google’s AI.
Much of this goes back to the old ways of delivering content to your prospective
website visitors:
Find a compelling subject and match a keyword.
Offer a fresh and possibly alternative perspective or a unique angle on your subject
matter. Be sure to include a targeted keyword or two in the text you are creating. Make
sure the words people would be searching for are in the text. Don’t forget that part of AI
is matching complete sentence searches which someone who might be do a Siri or Cortana
query from a phone. Normally these are complete sentences.
Include a Q & A at the bottom of the page.
What is the best way to get complete phrases as a keyword for phone searches?
Add a list of questions and answers at the bottom of your page. Think of your product or
service you are trying to pitch. Then hold your own phone to your mouth and ask your
phone to search for it based on what you would look for. Then explain your product or
service to a teenager and see what they would search for. You might be surprised by the
different results. You can optimize your page for several of those longer tail keywords if
you know what they are. Every time you find a new way of querying for your product or
service you can simply add a new question and answer in to the bottom of your web page
without adding a whole new page.
Do a sanity check though and make sure that consumers are actually using the
keywords that you are optimizing for to search for your product or service. You can learn
more in the next chapter on how to do this.
Don’t target for lots of visits like most people try to do. Don’t target Keywords that are
unlikely to bring visitors to buy your product or services even though they are searched for
more than average.
TIP: Standard optimization applies. RankBrain definitely analyses a
web page to make sure it follows Google’s guidelines and has good
coding. Make sure that after you create that great content that you
insert your keyword phrase throughout the content, post them in
specific locations such as the URL, title tag, H1, H2, in emphasized
text in the body of the post, and in the ALT tags on images. (You will
learn about this in the next few chapters.)
Other things to note for RankBrain factors.
There are a few other key notes for RankBrain factors:
1. RankBrain is only one of many algorithms and not used in every search.
2. The RankBrain algorithm uses less “Exact Match Keywords” than many of
the other algorithms. It looks for more variations in how the keywords are
used on a page. Some algorithms allow you to use one or two exact match
keywords in every paragraph and you watch your rankings rise. But
RankBrain emphasizes the importance of using several variations of your
targeted keywords. Even though it’s a machine AI, the key here is to write
for like a human.
3. Later in this book you will learn about semantic markup which actually
gives you an easy way of providing the context that RankBrain is looking
for. Semantic HTML markup is used to illustrate your targeted subject
matter by allowing you to tag the appropriate content or target of a page.
When it’s all said and done, RankBrain is just another advance in semantic search. If you
align your website with Google practices your rankings should fall in line and bring in
visitors. You will learn more about optimizing your pages for both best practices and the
RankBrain algorithm throughout this book.
