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How to lead in the dance of search engine optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 28, 2007 in SEO Theory

Before you can optimize, you have to know how to search. Amazingly, many people in the SEO industry don’t know how to search.

They type queries into search boxes but they don’t search. In fact, most SEOs who do “competitive research” rely upon browser plugins and “SEO tools” to do their searching for them.

While there may be some small advantage to allowing a tool to toil for you in the heat of the desert sun, you’re a tool fool if you cannot replicate what the tool tells you. Furthermore, if you cannot get better information from a search engine than any SEO tool provides you, you don’t know how to use a search engine.

And if you don’t know how to use a search engine, you don’t know how to optimize.

Search engines come first in search engine optimization. You have to understand what the search engine tells you about what it knows. You have to understand how to ask the search engine what it will tell you.

Search engines are annoyingly stupid. If you type in a query for “california real estate”, the search engines will assume you want to find the most heavily optimized Web sites that target the words “california real estate”.

If you want to compete with those sites for the words “california real estate”, you need to find out how many sites there are that optimize for the expression. You need to know which sites are using titles, on-page content, and URLs to optimize. You need to know which sites optimize their meta descriptions. You need to know which sites optimize their keywords meta tags.

To do real competitive analysis, you have to know who the players are, how many sites they operate, and which search engines they are targeting. You need to know which keywords they are targeting. You need to know how large their sites are, how broad their reach is. You need to know if they partner with sites in other industries.

Search engines will tell you that if you’ll only stop looking at the links on Yahoo! and pay attention to what you need to know.

Link analysis is a lost cause. Yahoo! may indeed tell you something about links but it won’t tell you which links pass value in either its own index or any other search engine’s index. And since Yahoo!’s coverage of the Web doesn’t overlap with Ask, Google, or Live’s coverage of the Web, knowing how many links Yahoo! knows about doesn’t tell you anything about what is in the other search engines’ databases.

Each search engine has its own query language. The major search engines all support a small subset of common query operators and operands, but most of them offer their own unique search capabilities (or at least their own unique commands). Do you speak Microsoft’s query language as well as you speak Google’s?

In fact, do you speak Google’s query language well enough to find out who is relying upon links for their optimization and who has a broader strategy? Do you speak Google’s query language well enough to find out which pages are passing value? A query language extends beyond the operators and operands the search engine provides you.

What is wrong with this query for ‘Google query tutorial’?

What is wrong with this query for ‘Yahoo! query tutorial’?

What is wrong with this query for “live search query tutorial”?

What is wrong with this query for ‘Ask.com query tutorial’?

The answer is the same for each of those questions: there are no query tutorials. Try “Google query language” and you’ll get some results but they are all outdated and incomplete. You may find a few things about “MSN query language” but nothing about “Yahoo! query language”. “Ask query language” may net you one obtuse result.

In an industry that has failed miserably to document the various search engine query languages, how useful do you really think those SEO tools are? While they fumble with Yahoo! link reports (failing to subtract out the bogus links Yahoo! reports, not to mention the same site links), your favorite SEO tools are conducting less sophisticated queries than you yourself probably use in a daily dose of “competitive research”.

But have you ever looked at a competitive vertical through the results of multiple query tests? Do you just grab the first results for unfettered keywords, look at Toolbar PR, and count links through Yahoo!? If that is the extent of your off-site competitive analysis you don’t learn anything about the vertical itself, who the players are, what their optimization strategies are, and what their strengths are.

Link data is the most useless information in search engine optimization. Any idiot can see that a site with 100,000 backlinks is probably going to outperform a site with 10 backlinks. That’s not competitive analysis, that’s just being lazy. If you have two sites ranking well in search results but the site with 3,000 Yahoo! backlinks is ranking better than the site with 30,000 Yahoo! backlinks, what have you learned from your link data?

We don’t know why search engines offer the great query functions they provide us with, but the engines surely don’t have search optimizers’ financial interests at heart. Search engines are designed by whizkids who want to drill down into data. Search engine optimizers tend to be ordinary guys who just want to push one site to the top for a handful of expressions.

When I interview people for SEO-related positions, I like to ask them questions that seem to have no relevance to whatever the job may be. I might ask you, “If I came up to you and told you I can get a Web page to rank well for about 100 competitive SEO expressions, what would you say?”

There is no right answer to the question. It’s a question that reveals something about your personality to me. You cannot NOT answer the question. You cannot hide everything about your personality from it because the question itself is an unasked question. Just telling you that doesn’t change the value of the question, because now that you know I might ask you that question I have forever changed your reaction to it but you will still react in some way.

This is what search is all about. Drilling down into data to find something useful, usable, and valuable. If you can ask probing questions of people, you should be able to ask probing questions of search engines. Search engines don’t think. But search engines do make a lot of rules-based evaluations when you ask them for information.

Learn to work with those rules. Make the search engine rules your tools. Don’t limit yourself to the (lack of) imagination and creativity of other people who write “great SEO tools”. No one has written any great SEO tools. They are all crap that tell you nothing useful. You can learn more with one query than you can with all the SEO tools on the Web.

I do not exaggerate when I say that because none of the SEO tools do very much. They provide you with three types of data: Yahoo! links (and sometimes other links), Google Toolbar PageRank, and maybe if you’re lucky some sort of keyword analysis. Every other “feature” is just a variation on those functions.

Yahoo! link data is just worthless mush.

Google Toolbar PageRank is only a derivative value that doesn’t even reflect the current internal PageRank (and it’s only published once every 3-4 months).

Keyword reports don’t tell you if I’m really optimizing for those keywords. They may tell you I’m putting those keywords into my keywords meta tag. There is more to optimization than meta tags. There is more to search engine optimization than links.

You should be able to look at a search engine results page without the benefit of any tools or plugins. You should be able to see at a glance whether that page is loaded with competitive results, competitors, or candy waiting to be taken from babies. If you don’t have the instinct to tell at a glance what is right or wrong with a search results page, then how can you possibly benefit from the garbage that SEO tools hand you?

You should spend at least an hour each day doing nothing but running queries on several search engines. If Google is your favorite search engine let it be so because you know what you don’t like about the other search engines.

Just based on the limited statistical data I have about this blog, I can tell you three facts about the majority of its readers:

1. Most of you use FireFox
2. Most of you use Google
3. Most of you bookmark this blog

What does that tell you about yourselves?

The information tells me that: most of you are SEOs (no big surprise there, given the topic of the blog) or Web marketers; most of you use browser plug-ins; most of you couldn’t care less about Ask, Live, and Yahoo!.

Firefox is not nearly as widely used as Internet Explorer. Do you still optimize pages for Internet Explorer? Many SEOs only optimize for Firefox and their pages look like crap in IE. My pages universally look plain and ugly but they render as I intend them to in both IE and Firefox.

What browser your market uses is as important to search engine optimization as which search engine they use. Why is that? A few choice queries on any major search engine would tell you something about who uses FireFox, why, and what you can do to help those people find your content more easily.

If you know most of your visitors will use Safari, you don’t need to optimize for anything other than Safari. But if you’re going after the crowd who don’t invest in browser plug-ins, you’d better learn to appreciate the cute tricks Microsoft lets you perform with a Web site. Optimization never ends, and it certainly does not end with what the searchers see in the results. You have to capture their mindshare with what the search results lead them to.

My experience with social dancing provides a very strong lesson that applies just as much in search engine optimization as in Salsa or Ballroom Dancing: if you are dancing the lead, your partner will appreciate the experience more if you know more than (s)he.

In search engine optimization you lead because everyone else follows. That means you absolutely MUST know more about how to search than everyone else. Until you master the skills of search, you’re in no position to lead other searchers.