Search Engine Optimization in a Google Dominated World

Google still dominates the current search engine world with a 64.6% share of the US Search Engine market. Yahoo is in second place with just 16%, and Bing is moving on up at 10.7% (or a combined 26.7%) according to Nielsen Online’s most recent statistics.

Why should search engine results be top of mind? Because it’s big business! According to eMarketer, they believe search ad spending will be nearly one-half of total US online ad spending in 2009, with spending growth of more than 13% predicted for this year to reach $12 billion. Many businesses rely on PPC advertising for their lead generation, and get found through Google with a combination of organic search results listings and PPC ad campaign. When is the last time you used your printed Yellow Pages? Whether you sell refrigerator parts or custom t-shirts, you get found through Google. We know there are two parts to the Google search engine page, one is the organic search results, the other are the paid results (aka AdWords PPC ads). You can certainly pay your way to a high AdWords PPC location, but you still have to work with Google’s mysterious search engine algorithms in order to be found on the coveted first page.

Common sense would dictate that having a website that contains great content and gives a great user experience will help you get those elusive first page rankings, but this is often not the case. The question becomes, do you design a website for a great user experience or search engine spiders? Arguably, if no one can find you in Google, then you just don’t exist, so the later is critical.

We’ve already seen a shift in this strategy by the way press releases are now written. A press release today needs to be written in a search engine friendly manner, with keywords leading the way, not creativity. No longer do you use a peppy title that gets the readers attention, now you need to have a peppy title along with your keywords strategically placed in both the title and first paragraph.

The fact is that Google is always changing its algorithms on how is crawls the web to find and index content. I happen to think Google search results criteria currently has two fundamental flaws: (1) the results are not timely; and (2) Google appears to be placing less importance on quality than on the number of inbound links (often from low quality, poor content websites designed only to drive traffic to the main website).

First, lets discuss the relevance of Google search results. I recently wanted to know how many cell phones are in the world, of course I went to Google and did a search, the first result was a Wikipedia definition of a cell phone (not what I was looking for), and the second result was dated 2002, over 7 years old! Well, we all know that 7 year old data on technology is really only good for showing anecdotal comparisons, it doesn’t do anything to help me find out how many cell phone have been sold in the most recent quarter. Google’s other downfall is it will place a high importance on a blog, and because the out dated blog posting is on a popular blog it shows up on the first page (even though the blog entry is 7 years old!). For me this is almost a daily occurrence, and I’m now training myself to use Google’s advanced search options, but really, how many of your customers are sorting their search results by date through Google’s advanced search options? I bet pretty close to zero.

Secondly, every other “seo tips” posting for the last year has focused on the importance of link building. If I check my spam folder, I have many requests for irrelevant “link exchanges.” Now I’m beginning to see all that misguided hard work show up in organic Google search results. The fact is good sites with great content shouldn’t need irrelevant inbound links, they should be able to rely on reputation and content, but Google has a disconnect on what the searching public wants (content). Most people want relevant results, not the results of someone with poor content, but has manged to manipulate Google’s current search criteria to get higher rankings. For this reason, for the first time in years I no longer use only Google, but find myself switching between, Google, Bing and Twitter Search to find the most relevant results.

So if you have a great site, and you want to show up higher in Google’s rankings, you’re going to need to spend a large amount of time building links back to your website from irrelevant (low usage) websites. For example, I and a competitor both have a YouTube video, mine has over 600 views, his has 80, guess who is in the first page results? Not mine (which one would assume with a higher number of views has better content, which of course it does!). Nope, Google thinks the one with a network of irrelevant websites (with a sole purpose of generating inbound links to the companies primary website) are much more credible than having a few, high-reputation websites with content that is actually being viewed (hence the over 5 times number of views). Now we are scrambling to upload our video’s on Viddler, Vimeo, and other video oriented social media sites to get more inbound (albeit low value) links to our primary websites. Let’s face it, YouTube owns the video market, why would links from low usage sites like Viddler and Vimeo, impact organic SEO?

The fact is you still need to get the user to your page, and to do that you need to design with the Search Engine’s in mind (of course, you also need to meet the users needs by providing great content and user experience or you will not convert).

These are my thoughts of the current state of the SEO nation.

Jeff Russell