What is Search Engine Optimization?
For anyone that owns a business, or a website for that matter, whether it be related to a business or not, should be aware of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is the process by which a website is moved to the top of the Google (and other search engines) rankings. The search engines rely on certain metrics when determining where a website should rank in the search results. Some of these metrics are found on the site itself, and others are off-site metrics. Before we get into that, if you’re looking for Cincinnati SEO services, or web design Cincinnati, contact RLM, they know what they’re doing.
On Site Metrics
When a search engine “spider” crawls a website – fancy geek talk for finding and storing metrics on a particular web page – it uses proprietary technology to determine what the website and all the pages within that site are about. Based on various clues, such as meta tags, content on the page, images on the pages, video, etc, the search engines are fairly adept at determining the topic of a particular page and what keywords that page relates to most significantly.
I said they’re “adept” at determining this information, but that isn’t the entire story. In fact, because these “spiders” are merely computer programs that follow links from website to website all around the internet, they can’t determine the topic of a particular page nearly as accurately as a human being could. Because of this, if you’re dentist in Cincinnati, you may have a page that’s all about you, a Dentist in Cincinnati, but the search engines may not determine that page to be totally related to the keyword “Cincinnati Dentist” as much as they probably should. Because of this, a thorough understanding of the way search engines read and understand content on the web is vital so that you can actually rank for the search queries your potential customers are searching for.
So, I guess you could say the on-site side of SEO relates to understanding the search engines’ weaknesses and making changes on the site itself to help the “dumb” search engines better determine that a particular page is, in fact, very closely related to a particular search term. When the search engines think a page is very closely related to a particular search term, they will generally rank that page higher in the search engines.
Off Site Metrics
Google pioneered what many of the search engines now use to determine how closely related a particular web page is to any given search query based on off-site metrics. The primary off-site metrics used for this purpose are links and anchor text. A link is simply that blue (or sometimes other color) text that you find underlined on a web page that, when clicked, leads you to a new web page. The reason Google took off and became as big as it is now is because they realized they could essentially view those links as votes for a particular website. The more links a website has, the more votes Google sees, and the higher that website will tend to rank.
Now, that leaves the problem of determining which keywords a website should rank for based on the links pointing to that website. That’s what the anchor text does. Let’s say you have 1,000 websites linking to your homepage, and the text in those links (also known as the anchor text) is your name. That will tell the search engines that 1,000 other website owners think your homepage is about you, and those search engines will likely rank your homepage near the top of the results when someone searches for your name.
Likewise, going back to our Cincinnati Dentist example, if you want to rank for the search term, “Cincinnati Dentist,” you would want to get other sites to link to your website with the anchor text, “Cincinnati Dentist.” When the search engines see links like these, then visit your site and see that it’s about dentistry and, perhaps a mention of Cincinnati, they’ll likely rank you near the top of the results for “Cincinnati Dentist” because all those other website owners essentially voted for your site to be ranked high for that term.
Who Were the Boskops
This sounds like a science fiction story, but apparently it’s true. It’s all the more amazing because whenever we hear of extinct variations of human beings, they are always neanderthals.
Boskops?
Apparently they were a a species of human being that died out 10,000 years ago at the latest. There’s that old familiar number 10,000 again.
And they had some odd features some of us would immediately recognize: small “childlike” faces and huge “melon” heads, allegedly 30 percent larger than our own, which has led to speculation in a new book about their superior intelligence.
A number of people are already wondering if the Boskops did indeed die out, and if the Grays are actually Boskops.
I am most amazed by the fact they have been kept secret while neanderthals got all the press.
You can find different reviews of the new book here and here. Very interesting.
UPDATE: You can read an excellent and eloquent excerpt from Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley, about these strange humanoids, here.
