Internet Marketing Basics: Understanding Our Search Engine Overlords

It seems like ages since i wrote on my blog, and for that I apologize. The new gig has kept me more than busy and I’ve just been running on empty when I got time for the blog. However, now that we have the campaign now under way I’ll be back to a more regular posting schedule. So without further adieu, here’s some new stuff.

Search engines are one of the internet marketers best friends, yet they are sometimes ignored (crazy I know) or more often misunderstood. So here’s what I’d like to do, give you a quick rundown of search engine basics.

Search engine stats

A little while ago comScore released some very interesting search engine stats that really put the whole shebang into perspective.

Defining Search Marketing
Total world wide searches per month: 61 Billion

• Google = 37 B
• Yahoo = 8.5 B
• Baidu = 3.2 B (China)
• Microsoft = 2.1 B
• KHN = 2 B
• eBay = 1.3 B
• AOL = 1.2 B
• Ask = 743 M

Those numbers are just staggering and search trends keep growing. At this rate Google really will take over the world within a couple years. The big question is though how will you appease your Google overlords? Relevant content is the only thing that seems to make them happy and that all starts with your keywords. Keyword research is something that I have always had a bit of trouble with but thankfully there are a few tools to help us out.

• Word Tracker
• KeyWord Discovery
• Google KeyWord tool
• SeoBook KeyWord Tool
• Spacky KeyWord tool

Now we’re armed with keywords. We know how crazy powerful search is, so now what? Well to better understand our Google overlords we need to ask…

How do Search Engines Work?
Search engines are powered by spiders. It’s true, search engine spiders crawl the internet hopping from link to link like a hobo hopping freight cars. They get their info from the dynamic process of crawling and building a data base (or search engine index) of the information they find. There are 2 things to keep in mind when dealing with Spiders.

• Spiders can see code we don’t see like Meta Tags.
• Spiders pay attention to bolded, header, and linked text and weighs it against the site and destinations for relevancy.

Then, based on things like number of active pages on the internet,  relevancy of website to the search query, page rank, etc you will get your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking. I’m happy to say that I currently dominate the all 10 Google results for Josh “Shua” Peters. It’s unique enough that it wasn’t very hard, but it gives me a good way to stand out from the crowd.

One thing to be weary of is people selling snake oil in the form of quick ranking schemes or people who say they know the Google algorithm for ranking. I’m going to make it simple for you. They don’t. The Google algorithm contains over 100 variable and changes 8-12 times a month so no one but the inner circle of Google knows that information. The best thing for you to do is be relevant, be consistent, create good content, and work on getting some of those juicy inbound links.

Next we’re going to hit up the paid stuff and the submission stuff so stay tune for more on that.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

Tweet This Post