Technology

Behind the Curtain: SEO

Written by David Bayer on June 27, 2007 4:51 pm EST

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Everybody wants to rank higher in search. With 72 Billion worldwide searches each month, it’s no wonder. 85% of the clicks on search engine results pages (SERPS) take place on the natural, or organic search results. Companies have built entire business models and very successful enterprises on a keen understanding of how the Internet works, how to leverage search, and how to monetize visitors.

Speaking of Google . . . is anyone other than Google making a profit off of Adwords? Interesting article from the Post today. I’m curious how Google is going to fend off leaner, faster moving customer acquisition models that move beyond the click. Oh, buy them. How many years has it taken them to start testing a CPA platform? I was also astounded that EBAY represented 4% of Google’s revenue. But really, how can you feel sorry for someone who has $100M and can’t figure out better ways to spend it. I mean, start showing up in organic SERPS already Ebay (contact me here!)

I won’t forget about Yahoo! I’ve submitted one of our sites to their search reinclusion team again. Talk about customer care. Not only do I keep getting the same automated response despite my indication that I keep getting the same automated response but they spam me with a survey asking how my experience was! When did we decide it was okay for multi-billion dollar Internet companies to isolate themselves from their users? I mean, show a little respect, what would you be without our websites in your indices?

My clients sometimes ask me how its fair that some of their competitors, ripe with spammy pages filled with Adwords, dominate the SERPS in their keyword markets. Fair left this game a long time ago baby.

Take Topix for example, one of my favorites. Rich Skrenta, a pioneer of the web with resume experience at Commodore, Sun, Netscape & AOL, founds DMOZ, an infamously broken human reviewed online directory. Google adopts (and incredibly, still utilizes) DMOZ as the source of the Google Directory. Rich Skrenta founds Topix.net and coordinates a manual inclusion of more than 10,000 links from DMOZ (and subsequently Google) to Topix. Topix benefits from superior organic rankings in Google, which bases its page rank algorithm on the number and anchor text of inbound links to a particular site. Topix becomes one of the fastest growing news/rss destinations on the Internet, with little to no original content of their own. Topix monetizes their traffic predominately through Google Adwords, allowing them to solidify their position within their web niche. Topix wants to convert over to a .com domain name, and Google refuses to assist them in the process.

With friends like those, who needs myspace?

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