My referrals teach me SEO
While looking through my search referrals (with the glorious Mint), I came across a term that seemed too broad for my site to pull up in any decent position. Usually I get found for pretty specific things such as *Winning by Jack Welch* or the most recent, *desktop backgrounds of love*. (Uh…?)
The term was *color palette 2006*, which according to Google has 7.4 million results, out of which I came up number 9. It was a deep link to my post about BePrivy’s color palette—*2006* was nowhere to be found except for in the URL.
The part that I love about this (besides the tiny boost in traffic from all the color trendwatchers out there) is that whoever actually searched that term and found me, would have at least found commentary about color palettes, with links to additional color palettes over at Firewheel. It may not have been exactly what they were searching for (if I had to guess) but it was at least leading in the right direction.
For all the talk about how advanced Google’s algorithms are, the SERPs are still filled with plenty of disparate results that seem to only be showing because they have some combination of the term you searched for, not neccessarily together in a string (usually not it seems), and a lot of people link to them. (Unless you searched for something really esoteric, in which case you only got 23 results back.)
I wonder if the person who searched for *desktop backgrounds of love* found what they were looking for—I know we all love GTD, but somehow I doubt I’m what they had in mind.
It seems like search engines have become a little lazy, knowing that we can put quotes around “important phrases” that we want in search results. But… if I were looking to make a search engine, the first thing I would do is go back for more Computer Science schoolin’. And the next thing I would do is give more weight to the order of terms, with the weight increasing with how close the terms are to each other.
so, being naive and not understanding all this web stuff, what exactly does your color palette do? i’m a little confused about it.
kmrn: It’s not what my color palette does, literally. I’m talking about the phrase *color palette* coming up in Google’s search results.
SEO is the practice of developing/designing your site, especially your content in a fashion that boosts your rankings in the search engines, so that you drive more “free” traffic to your site. The search engines, especially Google, make a fuss about how intelligent their algorithms are for determining relevance (the holy grail of search engine results), and yet just by looking at the terms this site has pulled up for, I can tell you that we’re still a ways off from really quality relevance.
Of course, most people using a search engine can tell you the same thing, just by the fact that it’s very rare all the results relate to what you are actually looking for.
But since I can see which terms I’m pulling up for (i.e. *desktop backgrounds of love*), I can examine where those exact words appear in my site (are they in the title, in the URL, in a link, etc) and try to figure out how Google is weighting them in their algorithm, then adjust appropriately to try and drive more traffic.
It’s not something I actually do, especially not on this site, but it’s definitely interesting to watch. There’s a whole gaggle of Google-watchers (sorry, couldn’t resist) over at WebMasterWorld—just lurk in their forums for a while and you can pick up a ton of information.