2.1. The Power Of Porcupines
Pretend that you are a Search Engine, just for a moment (but no longer than that, or your headache will be intense). How do you tell whether a page is relevant when a surfer enters “porcupine mating habits” as a search term?
Now that you are a Search Engine, you are obviously going to look for that term (“porcupine mating habits”) on each Web page... you’ll check places like the Title, headlines, links, body text, etc. You’ll look for synonyms for “porcupine” (even scientific synonyms like “Erethizontidae”) and related words (ex., “quills”). These are all called “on-page criteria.”
On-page criteria are important for giving the engines a “handle” on your page.
On-page criteria used to be all that the first SEs checked. Now, though, this has been taken about as far as it can. I mean... there are just so many factors you can look for on a page. And hundreds of PhD Search Experts have come pretty close to exhausting those. Only one problem...
On-page criteria do not tell the engine one iota about whether the page is any good or not. It will take another decade before computing power and Artificial Intelligence reach the level where an engine can “look” at a page and know, just from the on-page content,” whether it’s any good. As I’ve mentioned, this is something that we humans can still boast over the machines!
So what would you, Mr./Ms. Search Engine do now?
Ah-ah! If you cannot be as “intelligent” as a human, why not track how they react to each page offered on each SERP? By “peeking at what humans think,” the engines can “pretend” to have the intelligence to determine how good a page was (as well as refining relevance).
That is exactly what is happening. More and more, the engines look to off-page criteria, but not to the exclusion of on-page. They need the on-page data for the “first-level-relevance-reality-check.” The off-page is an important overlay that enables the engines to determine both...
- a higher degree of relevance, and...
- how good (or bad) a page may be.
In other words, off-page criteria bring the engines a heck of a lot closer to “recognizing reality.”
SIDEBAR
From here on in, this e-booklet focuses purely on one of
the off-page criteria... links. There are many other important off-page
criteria, but links...
- are easy enough to develop that they are worth the effort
- help get you listed in engines that do not accept submissions due to the natural spider activity of link-following
- help get that snowball up and over the hump, after which “the
build builds” if you simply keep doing the right things... Content
Traffic PREselling Monetization
Regarding that hump that I mentioned in the last chapter...
For a site in its early stages, a couple of credentializing links may mean the difference between sticking permanently in a SE’s database, and being dropped periodically. Engines sometimes drop sites that do not have any established link popularity.
Yes, you can get relisted, but you may lose weeks. So be proactive...
Get a couple of quality links as soon as you have twenty pages or more.
We will not talk about the ever-increasing complexity and diversity of off-page criteria any more in this booklet. But do remember that they are increasingly more important and ever more complex. They are also hardly discussed or understood. Suffice it to say that it will become harder and harder to manipulate those, leaving SEOers farther and farther behind.
Only Content Traffic PREselling Monetization
creates the reality of good and relevant theme-based content
Web sites that naturally and powerfully cause your visitors to fan out
across the Web (after visiting your site) and deliver the behavior that in
turn delivers the off-page criteria in an almost magical way. Yes...
“The Tao of SBI!”
Let’s continue with our “porcupine mating habits” example...
MYLW: <<2. Quality Inbound Links 2.1. The Power Of Porcupines 2.2. I Have This Friend...>>
