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The n dimensions of search engine optimization analysis

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 16, 2008 in SEO Metrics, SEO Theory

You can map search engine optimization across a variety of mathematical models. For example, traditional organic SEO is concerned with promoting a single URL to the highest possible position in the search results for a keyword. You can measure your position by drawing a line with 1,000 points numbered from 1 to 1001. Your current search position can be plotted on the line (1001 means the URL is not listed in relevant search results). We can call this a 1-dimension search engine optimization metric.

You can also draw a line with as many points as the search engines you want to monitor ranging from 0 to last engine. For every search engine where your site is listed, you mark a point. This is another example of a 1-dimension SEO metric. Note that whereas the first metric uses 1001 to denote non-inclusion, the second metric uses 0 to denote non-inclusion.

You can combine metrics to create 2-dimensional grids. For example, let’s say you measure your position on 10 search engines. You’ll be charting 10,000 points in your grid. Another example would be to chart the positions of all your pages on your site within 1 search engine. Say you have a 10-page Web site. Where do those pages rank for your targeted keyword? You can create a 2-dimensional grid of 10 lines (again, covering 10,000 points).

And you can again combine metrics to create 3-dimensional grid. For example, you can chart every page on your 10-page site across 20 search engines, so you have a grid measured 1000 by 10 by 20 (including 200,000 points). Another way to create a 3-dimensional grid is to map your pages across multiple keywords. If you’re trying to rank your 10 pages for 5 keywords your grid would be measured as 1000 by 10 by 5.

Of course, you can take that second 3-dimensional grid and convert it to a 4-dimensional grid by adding a dimension for search engines. Another way to create a 4-dimensional grid would be to measure rankings for your 10 pages across 5 keywords across a period of time (let’s say you check rankings once per week).

Again, you can take that second 4-dimensional grid and convert it to a 5-dimensional grid by measuring your chronological rankings across multiple search engines. Another way to create a 5-dimensional grid would be to measure rankings for your 10 pages across 5 keywords across a period of time and measuring where your competitors’ sites rank.

You don’t just have to chart rankings. You can chart rates of reported link growth across multiple search engines. Whereas I have pointed out time and again that anyone who uses Yahoo! to analyze Google backlinks is a complete and total idiot, it’s actually helpful to look at how much your reported links change (and hopefully grow) in all the major search engines. If you see growth in Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo! reported links you’re probably obtaining some pretty good links.

Even though Google will only report a random selection of links and Yahoo! reports many non-existing links, if you see comparable growth across all four search engines in reported linkage (and getting Ask to reports links is even more difficult than getting links from Google) you’re doing something right. And if you can track your own reported link growth trends then you can track other people’s reported link growth trends.

Just don’t lose sight of the facts that 1) Reported links are not ACTUAL links and 2) Links reported by one search engine are not the links another search engine takes into consideration.

You can also measure search visibility, which is similar to a rankings analysis but you can change the rules. For example, you can say a Web page has search visibility if it appears in the top ten results for an active query (a query that people actually use). If a page is relevant to multiple active queries you can create some interesting charts, comparing its performance across time and multiple search engines with the performances of other pages for those queries.

You can measure rates of growth for content appearing in indices, reported links, indexed pages appearing in active queries, etc. The types of useful analysis you can perform extend to many areas. You need fluid working definitions for concepts like search visibility, search engine coverage, rankings, etc. If you track data in a spreadsheet then you’re probably already playing with models and creating pretty graphs. If you’re just storing data in a spreadsheet then you need to start playing with models and pretty graphs.

If you’re not capturing data you’re not optimizing for search.

SEOs have gotten lost in their love for links. They do stupid things like buy expensive spammy domains and 301-redirect them to good sites, they publish widgets with irrelevant links, they drop links in forums and blog comments, they study SEO glossaries that provide nonsense definitions for terms like link farm (a link farm is any group of Web sites where every member in the group links to every other member of the group). Of course, everyone has an SEO glossary and most of them don’t rank and are not all inclusive. But most SEO glossaries provide incorrect definitions for things like “link farm”.

Although as a standards advocate I would love to see a standardized glossary adopted (and it won’t break my heart if my definitions are eschewed for someone else’s definitions as long as all the concepts are properly included and defined), SEO glossaries do more harm than good right now because they confuse the community. This is actually one topic where Wikipedia outperforms other SEO glossaries because of the community input (lack of standards negates the quality deficiencies that plague Wikipedia articles) and because Jonathan Hochman (and other SEOs who believe in the Wikipedia concept) has done a pretty good job of protecting the articles from egregious editing. The “link farm” article is still fairly correct in its historical details and is completely correct (as of this writing) in its technical definition, but I cannot guarantee that will always be the case.

The plurality of SEO glossaries and definitions confuses the community about metrics as well as everything else because we don’t have any generally agreed-upon idiom. Idiom is the way we speak (or write). If we cannot use the same definitions we cannot create standards. If we cannot create standards we cannot produce meaningful guidelines for analyzing search engine optimization. Rankings are about the only metrics we agree upon, and nearly everyone agrees it’s not all about rankings.

We have to give our clients (or employers) reports on activity, accomplishments, and projections for future performance. Those projections should be made on the basis of trends analysis (and liberally sprinkled with disclaimers). But even trends analysis, which has not yet been severely disrupted by the chaos of diverging opinion, is very poorly defined for the search engine optimization community.

With this post I’ve introduced a new category to SEO Theory: SEO Metrics. I’ll recategorize some past posts to include them in the SEO Metrics category but I’ll also give more thought to this topic in the near future.