Posted by mystery_guestINTRO From Rand:Tonight's post comes from my beloved fiancée, who's generously donated her time to help keep the blog going while I'm out of town at SMX Social Media.As many of you know, Rand travels quite a bit for his work, leaving me at home with Raul, the cabana boy. All is well for the first few hours, until I grow tired of Raul's deep tissue massages and the peeled grapes he insists on feeding me. After that, I tend to get a little bored and lonely. I'm assuming the other conference widows out there feel the same way, and as such, I've composed a list of ways to pass the time when your fiancée is away and your rippled Ecuadorian paramour is dehydrated.  Try to name all the countries in the world. Realizing it is hopeless, try for all the states of the union. Fail pitifully yet again, and get even more depressed when you realize you can name a greater quantity of characters from the Simpsons. To wit:_Bart, Maggie, Lisa, Homer, Marge, Abe, Patty, Selma, Mrs. Bouvier, Uncle Herb, Chief Wiggum, Ralph Wiggum, Sarah Wiggum, Snake, Lou, Eddie, Dr. Julius Hibbert, Mihouse Van Houten*, Nelson Muntz, Otto, Sherri and Terri, Principal Skinner, Superintendant Chalmers, Gladys Skinner, Comicbook Guy, Mrs. Krabappel, Krusty the Clown, Rabbi Krustofsky Corporal Punishment, Sideshow Mel, Sideshow Bob, Cecil Twilliger, Dr. Nick Riviera, Bleeding Gums Murphy, Gil, Troy McClure, Jasper, Bumblebee Man, Moe, Cletus, Jimmy Joe-Joe Junior Shabadoo, Lenny, Carl, Kent Brockman, Rainier Wolfcastle, Professor Frink, Lindsay Nagel, Cookie Kwan, The Flanders (Ned, Maude, Rod, and Tod), Reverend and Helen Lovejoy, Luigi (of the pizza place), Jimbo Jones, Kearny, Dolph, Uder (the fat German foreign exchange student), Groundskeeper Willie, Lunchlady Doris, Wendell (the kid who throws up all the time), Hans Moleman, Apu, Manjula (and the octoplets), The Sea Captain, Jaque, Mindy, Tom (Bart's big brother), Pepe (Homer's little brother), Smithers, Mr. Burns, Mrs. Burns (Mr. Burn's mother, who he never forgave after she had that affair with Taft), Judge Constance Harm, Barney Gumble, Duff Man, Bea (Grandpa's dead girlfriend), Ray Magini, Disco Stu, Arnie, Lionel Hutz, Mayor Quimby (and his wife). Also Sophie (Krusty's daughter), and Luke Perry (who I include because he is Krusty's half brother on his mother's side)._Weep, because you still have no idea where the hell Ohio is.Rather than doing your spouse's laundry, hide his or her clothing around the house. Place dirty socks inside the pockets of a favorite blazer as a gentle reminder that leaving them on the floor near the hamper is not the same thing as putting them inside the hamper.Plan out the outfits you intend to wear at the next conference  you do attend. Walk around the house in them to check viability, comfort, transition from day to evening events, and warmth. Don't dwell on the fact that it's 11pm and you're changing your clothes and doing your make up.Watch television programs your spouse finds unfit for human consumption. Namely, Chuck, becausedespite being incredibly stupid and poorly written, you sort of think the lead is dishy. Also, VH1's Rock of Love , where, as one reviewer put it, one contestant can say to another "I don't really think you're a whore", and it's one of the most endearing things to happen all season.Invite your girlfiends over for a pillow fight/malt liquor tasting. Explain to your spouse that you would have documented the event, but someone decided to take the camera to the conference. I'm sure those pictures of Dave Naylor were totally worth it.Commit perjury.Call around to every Nordstrom Rack in King County, vainly searching for the Coach Sara bootsthat you saw at the downtown store but that they didn't have in your size. Realize that you don't really want the boots, per se, but are enjoying the thrill of chase, a sensation which you can only assume is the remnant of the driving force that kept your ancestors alive when they were hunting and gathering food thousands of years ago. Use this reasoning to justify more shopping.Institute a dress code in your apartment. Break it by failing to wear shoes. Argue with the management and threaten to throw yourself out.Dinner: peanut brittle and ice cream. Any questions?Put on your pajamas and turn off all the lights in your apartment. Proceed to jump and down violently, stomping on the ground, throwing around small woodland creatures, and basically doing whatever you can to annoy the neighbor who lives below you. When she finally comes up to ask what the hell is going on, pretend she just woke you up and reprimand her for her rudeness.Write several emails to your editor friends, making simple mistakes like confusing "your" with "you're" and "it's" with "its". See how long it takes before there brains brake.Revel in the delightful irony of how Google would need to design its webpage to rank better at Google itself. Watch as your delight slowly turns to frustration and anger when you realize this hypocritical behavior is microcosmic of Google's policies as a whole, and accept that no matter how nice he is to you, Matt Cutts isn't really your friend. <sniff>Miss Rand.  *I left off Milhouse's parents because I couldn't get their names right. I thought they were Cliff and Leanne, but are actually named Kirk and Luann. I also left off Homer's mother, because I couldn't remember her name (it's Mona), as well as Ling, because I thought that she was Patty's daughter (she's actually Selma's) and that her name was Li. And naturally, this list is not complete because there were a few names I couldn't recall or get right. Feel free to add (names must be off the top of your head. No looking up info other than to check spelling).Also, Rand and I don't actually have a cabana boy.Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by great scott!As many of you probably know, today, October 15th, is the first annual International Blog Action Day. Thousands of blogs are joining together to write about one topic in many different voices: the environment. It's a fantastic idea that's gained some tremendous support from the United Nations, Google, LifeHacker and thousands of other partners big and small.SEOmoz is very proud to have been the first blog-based companyto sign on to join this effort. We were and are more than happy to lend whatever influence we may have to get an effort of this magnitude and importance rolling. The timing of Blog Action Day seems a bit uncanny what with Al Gore and the IPCC winning a joint Nobel Peace Prize just last week for their work in expanding climate-change awareness. However, when it comes to issues like the environment and the climate-change crisis, there's no such thing as too much attention. We tend to shy away from political issues here on the blog, but I don't consider the current environmental crisis to be the least bit political. It's a humanitarian issue that everyone should care about regardless of political leanings.  Climate change, industrial pollution, deforestation, carbon dioxide emissions...these things affect all of us, regardless of nationality, skin color, tax bracket, religious beliefs or voting history. There is only one thing that truly separates people when it comes to the world's environmental problems: those who are willing to do something and those who aren't. And that's really what Blog Action Day is all about, bringing thousands of voices together to talk about what they've done and what others can do. To show that there are a ton of ways you can make a difference and they don't have to be expensive, or time-consuming or difficult...every little bit really can count.So, soapbox aside, what has SEOmoz done to be part of the solution? Over the last several months, since Collis, Leo and Cyan contacted us about joining Blog Action Day, we've been auditing our records and calculating our annual carbon emissions for all of our business activities.  We are proud to say that today, to commemorate Blog Action Day, we made a contribution of $340 to Carbonfund.orgto offset 62 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions (slightly more than the 56.2 tonnes SEOmoz generated in the last year) to make SEOmoz officially Carbon Neutral.Fun Facts:73.7% of SEOmoz' carbon emissions are the result of air travel! Jeez, all of those conferences add up!Our office energy consumption is surprisingly low. We're virtually paperless around here and try to be really good about turning off lights and monitors at night (also, almost all of our light bulbs are compact fluorescents).How can you become Carbon neutral also? It's actually really easy, just go to Carbonfund.org and use their handy calculators to figure out how much carbon you produce as an individual, family or business. It doesn't take long and only requires you take the time to review your power bills, travel records and a few other figures from the past year, or even a few months to get an estimate.  The calculator will then tell you how much CO2 your activities generate each year and how much you'd need to donate to offset your carbon footprint.  Organizations like Carbonfund accomplish this by using your donations to invest in renewable energy, reforestation and efficiency programs. It's basically a credit system: your donation will fund a project that will reduce carbon emissions somewhereby the amount that you produce at home, the result: carbon neutrality. While we're proud that we've gone Carbon Neutral, and we hope everyone reading will consider taking a little time and a little money to do the same, we're not stopping there. As part of Blog Action Day, SEOmoz will donate 25% of all sales made todayto the Nature Conservancy, the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people (they also have a carbon footprint calculator). This is a great conservation cause that we're happy to contribute to. Want to help them and make an impact today? Well, all you have to do is purchase a Premium Membership. Along with all of the great features and materials you'll get, you'll also effectively be donating $100 (on a 1-year membership) to a great environmental cause and joining the thousands of folks participating in Blog Action Day!Again, we couldn't be happier to be a part of this momentous event. We send thanks and praise out to all of those bloggers and blog-readers the world over who've come together to make this happen and do their part to raise awareness and make a difference by helping to protect the environment and reverse climate change. We humbly invite all of our readers and members to join the movement and do what you can to help.Cheers,Scottp.s. FROM RAND:A friendly reminder that SEOmoz's blog comments are NOT a good spot for political debate. Thanks!Technorati TagsSEOmoz, Carbon Neutral, Blog Action Day, Carbonfund, Nature Conservancy, Climate Change, EnvironmentDo you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by randfishI'm halfway through my next post on rewriting the Beginner's Guide, but I'm just too tired to go on. Losing three hours coming over to New York doesn't help, either. So, I've turned my attention away from the project for now and thought I'd ask something a bit more participatory of the crowd here...What are the 5 industry-related websites (excluding the search engines themselves) that you learn the most from - the 5 that you couldn't live without (or at least, couldn't earn as much without)?I'll share my answer:TechmemeIf I visit Techmeme a couple times a day, I can be virtually assured that there will be no "big" conversations in the blogosphere or the tech world that I'm missing out on. That alone is worth its weight in gold. I really can't remember how I survived without it, but I'm pretty sure I had to do a lot more skimming to find the signal. SearchEngineLandIn search, there's no better source for industry-sepcific news. The columns on advice are occassionally good, too, but I find the majority of the value comes from Greg, Barry & Danny, who won't let any of the big or important stories fall through the cracks. SEOBookAaron's ascerbic take on the engines' motivations and his solid understand of the economics of web properties make his advice the most valuable single source I read. Cre8asite ForumsWhen I need help with a topic or a resource where I know plenty of folks smarter than I will rush to the rescue, I turn to Cre8. Kim Krause has built a property that is 100X better than forums 100x its size, thanks to the quality of people and contributions - no small feat. RedditI know, I know, technically it's not in the search or technology industry. However, the stories I find there, particularly some that never make it past page 3 give me a view into what the influencers of the web are enjoying and reading, even if it's outside the insular world of blogs & tech. It's also the best way I've found to have good stories to share at dinner conversations when everyone gets tired of talking about the latest top blog list. Sites that even I'm shocked didn't make the list include Roundtable, MarketingPilgrim, ResourceShelf, Sphinn and about 3 dozen others. Maybe I'm just not the kind of guy who can only live with 5 sites.Now it's your turn - which 5 sites would you be unable to live without? Feel free to leave live links to the URLs and don't worry about needing to explain your choices if you don't want to.p.s. My guess is that 50% or more will list Facebook #1.... <sigh>...Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by randfishIt's late, and I should be wrapping up Q+A (or at least blogging on my promised topic of the Beginner's Guide) and getting some shut eye, but I simply couldn't resist sharing some thoughts about the web-based fervor for Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. For those who don't know, Paul's supporters are possibly the most organized and galvanized web community in the modern political spectrum. Here's just a sample of their accomplishments:How a Fringe Politician Took Over the Web - from WiredRon Paul Has Lots of Money- from the NY ObserverThe Ron Paul Effect- ABC NewsI felt this quote, in particular, was impressively insightful:So are the polls missing a Paul boomlet? Is the famously contrarian ob-gyn -- a libertarian nicknamed "Dr. No" because of his propensity to vote against anything he believes contradicts the Constitution's original intent -- poised to surge into contention in the GOP field? Not likely. What's more likely, based on Web traffic over the past week, is that Paul supporters have mastered the art of "viral marketing," using Internet savvy and blog postings to create at least the perception of momentum for his long-shot presidential bid.Paul's supporters certainly have a knack for driving traffic and dominating online polls, as well as flooding mainstream media with calls for more attention to the long-shot candidate. The problem is, the networks running those online polls are starting to get savvy. Here's Allen Wastler, Managing Editor for CNBC.com with An Open Letter to the Ron Paul Camp:I haven't seen him pull those kind of numbers in any "legit" poll. Our poll was either hacked or the target of a campaign. So we took the poll down. The next day, our email basked was flooded with Ron Paul support messages. And the computer logs showed the poll had been hit with traffic from Ron Paul chat sites. I learned other Internet polls that night had been hit in similar fashion. Congratulations. You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can't help but admire that. But you also ruined the purpose of the poll. It was no longer an honest "show of hands" -- it suddenly was a platform for beating the Ron Paul drum. That certainly wasn't our intention and certainly doesn't serve our readers ... at least those who aren't already in the Ron Paul camp.If Paul's supporters really were as savvy about viral marketing as they claim to be, they would have long ago discovered the power of anchor text, link bombing and taking over the search results. Imagine - if the thousands of bloggers, hundreds of forums and handful of social networking sites all took it upon themselves to boost Paul's visibility through search engine rankings, they could achieve an effect far greater than the dominance of online polls - they could truly start to influence the campaign by marketing information for their candidate.Say the Paul supporters were savvy enough and dedicated enough; there's no limit to the pages on Paul's sitethey could get ranking for hot button issues and important, politically relevant queries - everything from Iraq Warto Immigrationto Health Insuranceand 2008 Electioncould have pages on Paul ranking in the top 1-5 results. With control of the search results, it's likely he'd have considerably more brand recognition than his current 29% (note the Reddit thread - If you don't read Reddit, there's a 70% chance you don't even know who Ron Paul is). The best part? Those Ron Paul supporters are very frequently armchair generals of the web - their fanaticism extends only as far as their blogs' collective RSS readers, but through this strategy, they would, in fact, leverage that weakness into a strength. After all, if you had an army of bloggers at your bidding, wouldn't you distribute a search strategy to rule Google's blue link lists?Naturally, this brings up a fascinating debate - if biased parties start taking advantage of the search algorithms' love of editorial blog links to wage information wars in the SERPs, how high might it escalate before the engines are forced to block or alter the results? If one search savvy political camp were to seize control of the results for a rival faction (picture if every search for George Bush in 2004 had returned a Kerry-based attack or vice versa), how long would it be before bloggers the web over joined the campaign? Perhaps in the future, we really will be voting over the web, but we'll do so with hyperlinks, not checkboxes. Maybe it's best to keep that Pandora's Box shut.And, of course, may the best SEO'd candidate win... p.s. Although this post does discuss political figures, SEOmoz IS NOT a forum for political discussion or the merits of particular beliefs or candidates. Myself, Scott, Rebecca & Jane are likely to quash comments that cross into the realm of political debate.Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by great scott!Hey Gang,It's been a crazy week here at the Mozplex, what with interviewing for a few new positions, all kinds of work to do and, well, let's just say a little lingering controversy from last week.  So it's definitely time to lighten things up with another installment of Whiteboard Friday.  This week, Rand discusses different roles bloggers and blog readers can play to make themselves visible online.PS - I forgot to screencap the Whiteboard before I left the office tonight in a mad dash to get to the local pub quiz, so I'll put up a picture of the board when I get in Friday morning. Cheers!Here ya go, all better...Technorati TagsSEO SEOmoz Rand Fishkin Whitebaord Blog Search Blogger Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by FluxxThis is just a quick update for those of you commenting on the blog via Internet Explorer 7.  Over time, more and more of you have been emailing me about a JavaScript bug where when a user would click the link to add a comment to a blog post, nothing would happen and IE would tell you there was an "Error on Page," with an essentially random line number that really tells you virtually nothing.  For anyone doing JavaScript development on IE, you know how hard debugging is.  There was a time where this affected no copy of IE7 in the office, at home, or anywhere else I checked, while we still received reports of it happening to users out in the wild. In any event, recently (for some inexplicable reason) this bug started happening to some computers in the office, so I was able to start testing and come up with a fix.  For those of you interested, newer updated versions of IE7 don't play nicely with certain animations in the script.aculo.uslibrary.  Attempts to upgrade our version of script.aculo.us did more harm than good, so the only real solution we have is to slightly limit the user experience for IE7 users.In English, this means that while on Firefox your comment box will gracefully fade in above the comment thread and be dragable, on IE7 your comment box will just appear at the top of the comments and be stationary.  Hopefully IE7 will soon have better support for script.aculo.us animations, or vice versa, but until then we're stuck with a slightly "less cool" commenting system for those of you on IE7.Technorati TagsIE7, javascript, script.acaulo.usDo you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by randfishFor the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.How Search Marketers Study & Learn How to Succeed in the EnginesThe complicated algorithms of search engines may appear at first glance to be impenetrable, and the engines themselves provide little insight into how to achieve better results or garner more traffic. What little information on optimization and best practices that the engines themselves do provide is listed below:Google - How Can I Improve My Site's Ranking?Yahoo! - How do I get listed in Yahoo! Search "Web Results," and how to increase the ranking of my site?Microsoft/Live - Guidelines for Successful IndexingAsk - Ask.com for WebmastersThe guidelines above aren't useless - some valuable tidbits are certainly present, including this from Yahoo!:Many factors influence whether a particular web site appears in Web Search results and where it falls in the ranking. These factors can include: The number of other sites linking to it The content on the pages The updates we make to our database The testing of new product versions The discovery of additional sites Changes to the search algorithm—and other factors Web Search lists results ranked by relevance and offers a combination of sites from the entire Web obtained by Yahoo! Search and from the Yahoo! Directory.And this from Microsoft's Live:In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site. Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB. Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link. Don't put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo. These tiny snippets are, thankfully, just the tip of the iceberg. Over the 12+ years that web search has existed online, search marketers have found methodologies to extract information about how the search engines rank pages and use that data to help their sites and their clients achieve better positioning. Surprisingly, the engines do support many of these efforts, though the public visibility is frequently low. Conferences on search marketing, such as the Search Marketing Expo, WebMasterWorld& Search Engine Strategiesseries attract engineers and representatives from all of the major engines. Search representatives also assist webmasters by ocassionally participating online in blogs, forums & groups (these are listed below in Appendix B).However, there is perhaps no greater tool available to webmasters researching the activities of the engines than the freedom to use the search engines to perform experiments, test theories and form opinions. It is through this iterative, sometimes painstaking process, that a considerable amount of knowledge about the functions of the engines has been gleaned. A common process for testing might look something like this:Register a new website with nonsense keywords (e.g. ishkabibbell.com) Create multiple pages on that website, all targeting a similarly ludicrous term (e.g. yoogewgally) Test the use of different placement of text, formatting, use of keywords, link structures, etc. by making the pages as uniform as possible with only a singular difference Point links at the domain from indexed, well-spidered pages on other domains Record the search engines' activities and the rankings of the pages Make small alterations to the identically targeting pages to determine what factors might push a result up or down against its peers Record any results that appear to be effective and re-test on other domains or with other terms - if several tests consistently return the same results, chances are you've discovered a pattern that is used by the search engines. Here's an example of a test that we at SEOmoz have performed in the past:In this test, we started with the hypothesis that a link higher up in a page's code would carry more weight than a page lower down in the code. We tested this by creating a nonsense domain linking out to three pages, all carrying the same nonsense word exactly once. After the engines spidered the pages, we found that the page linked to from the highest link on the home page ranked first and continued our iterations of testing.We had some concerns that the text inside the link might be the source of the rankings, and so changed the link text on the homepage to nonsense characters. Still, the pages ranked in order of highest to lowest rank. Over several more iterations (changing up the linked-to pages, changing the terms, mixing up term usage, etc.) and repeat testing, we found the pattern emerged again and again, and decided to call it "confirmed." It appears that the three major engines (Ask never indexed the domain) all place some amount of higher weight on links higher in code than lower down. Obviously, this is a time consuming and tedious process, but it can help search marketers to understand the basic patterns of how search engines determine rankings.This process is certainly not alone in helping to educate search marketers. Competitive intelligence about signals the engines might use and how they might order results is also available through patent applications made by the major engines to the United States Patent Office. Perhaps the most famous among these is the system that spawned Google's genesis in the Stanford dormitories during the late 1990's - PageRank - documented as Patent #6285999 - Method for node ranking in a linked database. The original paper on the subject - Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine- has also been the subject of considerable study and edification. To those whose comfort level with complex mathematics falls short, never fear. Although the actual equations can be academically interesting, complete understanding evades many of the most talented and successful search marketers - remedial calculus isn't required to practice search engine optimization.Through methods like patent analysis, experiments, and live testing and tweaking, search marketers as a community have come to understand many of the basic operations of search engines and the critical components of creating websites and pages that garner high rankings and significant traffic. The rest of this guide is devoted to explaining these practices clearly and concisely.... ooph. This is tough stuff - as always, please provide your input and edits. We'll be making changes to all of this content before it goes into the finished guide (and Mystery Guest even offered to edit - yay!)Today's web roundup:Lobo links tells us how to use CSS image replacement properlySteve Rubel says Search is Broken- I think he means "not as advanced as a very, very advanced user like him might want it," but it's still a good pointDr. Peter Meyers has a terrific (though lengthy) piece on the Basics of Measuring UsabilityGary Price exposes websites on the cutting edge of data mining- love itAnd more Gary - Send your children to public schooland use the money to buy... I don't know... KrustyO's- private schools aren't worth squatI got stumped in Q+A - if anyone reads Arabic and can help, I'd really appreciate it. Oh wow, the brilliant Pierre Faris already on it!I'm on David Brown (aka NEOSEO)'s podcast showtomorrow morning at 10am and it's already 2am... Man, I never get to sleep...Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by randfishFor the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.Part I: How Search Engines OperateThe major global search engines includeGoogle, Yahoo!, Microsoft/Live, Baidu, Naver & Ask.com. This guide primarily covers Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft & Ask - the major engines in the United States and other English language countries. Sadly, we don't have the expertise or experience to offer insight into Baidu (which operates almost exclusively in China) or Naver (Korea's primary search engine).The search engines have several major goals and functions. These include:Crawling and indexing the billions of documents (pages & files) accessible on the Web Providing answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages In this section, we'll be walking through the basics of these functions from a non-technical perspective.Crawling & IndexingImagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system. Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file). The search engines need a way to "crawl" the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available - links:ABOVE:London's "Tube" Serves as an Apt Analogy for the Journey of Search Engines Across the WWWIn our representation, stops like Embankment, Picadilly Circus & Moorgate serve as pages, while the lines connecting them (in black & brown) represent the links from those pages to other pages on the web. Once Google (at the bottom) reaches Embankment, it now sees the links pointing to Charing Cross, Westminster & Temple and can access any of those "pages."The link structure of the web serves to bind together all of the pages in existence (or, at least, all those that the engines can access). Through links, search engines' automated robots, called "crawlers" or "spiders" (hence the illustrations above) can reach the many billions of interconnected documents.Once the engines find these pages, their next job is to parse the code from them and store selected pieces of the pages in massive hard drives, to be recalled when needed in a query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engines have constructed massive datacenters, like this onefrom Google in The Dalles, Oregon:The NYTimes covered Google's datacenterin The DallesThese monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing unimaginably large quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results instanteously - even a 3 or 4 second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.Retrieval & RankingsFor most searchers, the quest for knowledge begins like this:And ends with a list of relevant pages on the web, returned in order of "importance." This process requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things - first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived value (or importance). It is both "relevance" and "importance" that the process of search engine optimization is meant to influence.To the search engines, relevance means more than simply having a page with the words you searched for prominently displayed. In the early days of the web, search engines didn't go much further than this simplistic step, and found that their results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through iterative evolution, smart engineers at the various engines devised better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, hundreds of factors influence relevance, many of which we'll discuss throughout this guide.Importance is an equally tough concept to quantify, but search engines must do their best. Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity - the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users' satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.So, when you see a page like this:You can surmise that the search engine (in this case, Yahoo!) believes that the Super Hero Stamps Pageon USPS.com is the most relevant and popular page for the query "super hero stamps," while the AP news articleon the topic is less relevant/popular.Popularity and relevance aren't determined manually (and thank goodness, because those trillions of man-hours would require Earth's entire population as a workforce). Instead, the engines craft careful, mathematical equations - algorithms - to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat's value). These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we often refer to them as "ranking factors." For those who are particularly interested, SEOmoz crafted a resource specifically on this subject - Search Engine Ranking Factors(last updated in April of 2007).... and with that, I'm off to bed. Please do share your thoughts in the comments below. Oh yeah - and must read stuff today would probably include:This post on YOUmoz about link juiceasks some good questions (I need to link over to YOUmoz more) The eMarketer study on Word of Mouth(via Justilien) is worth a look The AP reports on global search usage datafrom ComScoreMichael Gray had a great interview on advanced link tacticsAnd, Aaron had a brilliant one with Elifrom BlueHatSEO(another must-read blog)Worried about how Google might improperly penalize your site? Googlers respond to concernsabout a variety of subjects on Google Groups (Go Susan!)Whew... this is a lot of work. What have I gotten myself into?Do you like this post? YesNo

  Posted by rebeccaAs Rand mentioned in his Rewriting the Beginner's Guidepost, he and I will be speaking at SMX Social Medianext Tuesday and Wednesday. Once again, I will be speaking on the Linkbait panel with my buddies Brent Csutorasand Cameron Olthuis(and with Jane speaking on the Linkbait panel at SMX Londonin mid-November, it seems that Rand has officially passed the Linkbait panel torch to his employees). This will be the third time I'll be speaking on a Linkbait panel. The first time I spoke on it, I provided examples of some of our more successful linkbait campaigns, whereas the last time I spoke on the panel (at SES San Jose), I gave the audience an overview of what linkbait is and why it's important. I've been assigned the same topic for this upcoming conference, but I really want to change things up a bit. I'm not a fan of recycling the same presentation, so I want to come up with something fresh and new that the audience will enjoy.Here's where I seek out the advice of our talented and savvy SEOmoz community. What would you want to learn if you were in the audience during a Linkbait session? What sort of topics do you think I should cover/address? How can I provide both value and entertainment to the attendees? Keep in mind that I only have 15-20 minutes and that Cameron and Brent will likely cover case studies--I just get to present the 101 stuff. Social media is definitely one of the more fun aspects of SEO and Internet marketing, so I'm really looking forward to this entirely social media-focused conference. The sessions should be novel and exciting, and I want to kick ass and take names as well so that Danny won't see me fail, impose a lifelong SMX ban, and reduce me to presenting about how no, I don't work for Googleto my family members in the basement of a Budget Inn.So yeah, any advice or suggestions are welcome. Before I go, Cam pinged me to mention the Internet Marketers of New YorkCharity Party, co-sponsored by Best of the Web. The event is Monday, October 15, at the Town Tavern Bar & Grill, from 7-10 pm. It costs $40 to attend the event, but there will be an open bar plus the door donations will go to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Rand and I will be attending, as well as a bunch of other talented SEOs, so if you're attending SMX Social Media, I highly recommend attending the event to both donate to a great organization and to network with some of the finest folks in the industry.Do you like this post? YesNo