Search Engine Optimization
When the web first rose to popularity in the 1990s, people spoke of browsing or surfing the web, and users located interesting sites primarily by finding and clicking on links listed on major web directory sites like Yahoo! and Netscape. As the size of the web has exploded over the past decade (Google now indexes well over twenty billion web pages), browsing through sites by following web links has become an increasingly inefficient means to initiate a search for new or very specific information. You may still browse the home page of the New York Times or a personal portal page like iGoogle or MyYahoo!, but if you need anything more specific, you will probably go straight to a search engine such as Google.
The way your pages appear to the automated “spider” software that search engines use to “crawl” links between web pages and create search indexes has become the most important factor in whether users will find the information you publish on the web. Search engine optimization isn’t difficult and will make your site better structured and more accessible. If your site uses proper html structural markup, you’ve already done 80–90 percent of the work to make your site as visible as possible to search engines.
Search optimization techniques are not the magic sauce that will automatically bring your site to the top of Google’s page rankings, however. seo isn’t a cure-all for an ineffective site—it can increase the traffic volume to your site and make things easier to find, but it can’t improve the quality of your site content. seo techniques ensure that your site is well formed and lessen the possibility that you have inadvertently hidden important information while constructing your site. Over the long run, though, only good content and many reference links from other highly ranked web sites will get you to the first page of Google search results and keep you there.
The long tail of web search
Most patterns of web site use follow what is widely known as long-tailed distribution. That is, a few items are overwhelmingly popular, and everything else gets relatively little attention. If you ranked the popularity of every web page in your site, you will typically see a long-tailed curve, in which the home page and a few other pages get lots of views and most others get much less traffic. This long-tailed distribution pattern in popularity is true for products in stores, books for sale at Amazon, songs to download on iTunes, or dvds for sale at Wal-Mart.
Although Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson popularized the concept of the long tail on the Internet, interface expert Jakob Nielsen first used Zipf curves (the formal mathematical term for long-tailed phenomena) to describe the distribution patterns seen in web site usage. Long-tailed usage patterns are fundamental to explaining why web search has become the most popular tool for finding information on the web, whether you are making a general Internet search or merely searching your company’s internal web site. Once users get past the home page and major subdivisions of a large site, they are unlikely to browse their way through all the links that may be required to find a specific page, even if every link is well organized, intuitively labeled, and working properly (fig. 5.8).
Search Engine Optimization
When the web first rose to popularity in the 1990s, people spoke of browsing or surfing the web, and users located interesting sites primarily by finding and clicking on links listed on major web directory sites like Yahoo! and Netscape. As the size of the web has exploded over the past decade (Google now indexes well over twenty billion web pages), browsing through sites by following web links has become an increasingly inefficient means to initiate a search for new or very specific information. You may still browse the home page of the New York Times or a personal portal page like iGoogle or MyYahoo!, but if you need anything more specific, you will probably go straight to a search engine such as Google.
The way your pages appear to the automated “spider” software that search engines use to “crawl” links between web pages and create search indexes has become the most important factor in whether users will find the information you publish on the web. Search engine optimization isn’t difficult and will make your site better structured and more accessible. If your site uses proper html structural markup, you’ve already done 80–90 percent of the work to make your site as visible as possible to search engines.
Search optimization techniques are not the magic sauce that will automatically bring your site to the top of Google’s page rankings, however. seo isn’t a cure-all for an ineffective site—it can increase the traffic volume to your site and make things easier to find, but it can’t improve the quality of your site content. seo techniques ensure that your site is well formed and lessen the possibility that you have inadvertently hidden important information while constructing your site. Over the long run, though, only good content and many reference links from other highly ranked web sites will get you to the first page of Google search results and keep you there.
The long tail of web search
Most patterns of web site use follow what is widely known as long-tailed distribution. That is, a few items are overwhelmingly popular, and everything else gets relatively little attention. If you ranked the popularity of every web page in your site, you will typically see a long-tailed curve, in which the home page and a few other pages get lots of views and most others get much less traffic. This long-tailed distribution pattern in popularity is true for products in stores, books for sale at Amazon, songs to download on iTunes, or dvds for sale at Wal-Mart.
Although Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson popularized the concept of the long tail on the Internet, interface expert Jakob Nielsen first used Zipf curves (the formal mathematical term for long-tailed phenomena) to describe the distribution patterns seen in web site usage. Long-tailed usage patterns are fundamental to explaining why web search has become the most popular tool for finding information on the web, whether you are making a general Internet search or merely searching your company’s internal web site. Once users get past the home page and major subdivisions of a large site, they are unlikely to browse their way through all the links that may be required to find a specific page, even if every link is well organized, intuitively labeled, and working properly (fig. 5.8).
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