Innovations and Research at Web Site Services

Innovation and research at web site services: Search Engine Optimization

(Building a Better Mouse Trap)

Julie Coverdale

T

aking a look at the thousands of search engines out there on the Internet, I initially became quite overwhelmed with the choices. I suddenly felt like a novice on the Internet. To my surprise, there is almost a matching search engine for any topic the human mind can fathom. Realizing search engines are a direct fee for service business, I contemplated, “if I needed to market my web page, how would I choose?”

As complicated as the technology for the search engines may be, I reached the conclusion that there is only so much a search engine company can offer a client, boiling down search engine optimization (SEO) into marketing tools, speed and accuracy. Search engine’s try to provide top ranking of a marketer’s web page and generate the greatest traffic to their site.

So where do the search engine companies put their research efforts into building a “Better Mouse Trap” for the marketer? Some of the research at the major search engine companies is focused on the following top areas to lure the marketers to their company: limiting irrelevant search content, page speed, and keyword search.

Content Farms:

“Content farms” refers to the ever increasing amount textual content generated on the Internet, considered be low in quality, and designed to be picked-up by the search engine’s algorithms in an effort to maximize advertising dollars, but interfering with the top ranking of a marketer’s web page.1 This is considered, from the marketer’s view point , to be irrelevant search content. Google Inc. spent research and analysis dollars revising their search engine algorithm to improve the marketer’s web page ranking and the facilitate availability of its links from relevant content on the Web by “banish[ing] pages littered with second- rate content or overloaded with advertising… [that are] manipulating Google to land in the top...