So You Thought It Was Just Your Web Site You Needed to SEO, eh?
I hear a lot of people complaining about the time it takes to submit articles. For some reason they’re under the impression that article submission is like URL or classified ad submissions. But its not in any way, shape, or fashion.
This is especially true when you consider that Google and the other search engines are frantically trying to create algorithms to fine tune the relevancy of their searches, and they’re succeeding too!
This means you either follow suit, or you go bust.
One big part of the whole “SEO to suit algorithms” drama has to do with the use of links. The search engines rely heavily on the popularity of a site in determining its relevance and value to the community. They can’t just go out on the street and ask people what their favorite sites are, so they look at how many other sites have a link back to a site.
When you think about it, that’s almost as good as getting personal views about a web page. After all, if a site owner puts up a link to another web page, he or she is in fact saying, “this is good stuff.”
In a recent interview, Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting, asked Udi Manber, Vice President of Engineering at Google responsible for core search, the following question:
- Eric Enge: . . . do you see the role that links play in determining a site’s importance and relevance diminishing overtime?
- Udi Manber: It’s hard to say, I mean it might happen. When I think about it, it’s very hard to predict. I think they will play a major role for the foreseeable future, I don’t think there are going to be significant differences, but there might be small differences.
Ref: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-udi-manber.shtml
So link value, apparently, is here to stay for quite some time.
Some of those “small differences” revolve around increasing the value of the “user experience” by rendering the most relevant search results possible.
Until recently, links were links. If a site, or article, or blog had thousands of links pointing back to it, it was determined to be popular and thus valuable.
But it became more and more obvious that the true power of popularity was in the relevancy of those links. So even though a site or page had thousands of links pointing to it, determining the percentage of “relevant” links produced better results when it came to search queries.
In other words, just because a particular document had a high value as far as back links go, it didn’t necessarily mean the document was important enough or better still, informative enough to use in a search listing for a relevant keyword search.
What this means for the average article writer is . . .
You’d better be careful where you stick your articles if you want them to hold any weight with the search engines!
SEO Experts call this “off site optimization,” and according to the best of them, is far more important than what you do to make your web site compliant.
Consider this . . .
If you wanted to determine the value of a car you were thinking of buying, would you go into a Sporting Goods store and ask them? Or would you go to a car expert?
That’s what we’re talking about here.
Now suppose you were writing a review page about a particular car model. How valuable would your review be in the eyes of the search engines? And how would they determine this?
If your review was linked to by Joe’s Sporting Goods, Carrie’s Crib Supplies, and Hari’s Water Pipes, it might not hold too much weight. But if your review was linked to on Peter’s Auto Sales, or Joe’s Sports Car Sales, or a site called Auto Pipeline, it might be considered pretty good information and hold a lot more weight.
So to gain more weight (value) for your articles, its a safe bet to strategically place them into the most relevant places you can. The best way to do this, when submitting your articles to article directories where they’ll be found and relinked to, is to take the few extra seconds to place them in the proper categories.
Not only will they be easier to find by people who would most likely reuse them in a way that’ll increase their value, but just the category choice alone will add weight to them.
Of course another important aspect of off site SEO is to make sure your content is good. If you haven’t read my commentary on what it takes to get people to click on your bio box links, you can do so here.
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