Search Engine Optimization

As I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to explain why it is so important for all OurEcho contributors when someone like Nancy Kopp gets an article about OurEcho published in a local paper – especially one like the Manhattan Mercury that has an online presence.

For a week or so, an article like that does increase visitors as they click on the link and find their way to OurEcho, but this is only a part of the story. For the rest, you have to look farther into a segment of internet technology called search engine optimization (SEO). In short, SEO describes the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a web site by increasing the web site’s ranking in the search results returned from sites like Google and Yahoo. The higher a ranking, the greater the chance that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to browse only the first page of returned results, so where a site ranks in a search result is essential for directing more traffic towards a site.

So then the million dollar question becomes - How do you increase a site’s ranking in search engines? It’s a very complex question, but what adds to the complexity is that search engine companies like Yahoo and Google closely protect the algorithms they use to rank sites. They shelter their logic to make it more difficult for others to manipulate their rankings.

Even with that, it is possible to deduce some of the methods to their madness.
First, the number of times that OurEcho is referenced by other sites is important. I often see links from other sites like myfamily.com, appollos-lyre.com and many personal blogs. The internet is like a spider web and each of those references and intersections increases our rankings. But it goes beyond that – a complex engine like Google will also rate the relative importance of the site that is making the reference. Government, educational, and publishing sites have greater importance, so a reference in a newspaper like the Manhattan Mercury increases our rankings.

Hopefully this is starting to make some sense. Let me take it one step farther and detail how it helps each individual contributor. As the references increase the importance of OurEcho, the content on the individual pages of OurEcho become more important as well. Those pages are your pages with your names and your thoughts attached to them. So now when someone goes to Google and types in your name or a subject you have written about, the pages from OurEcho have increased importance and are returned higher up the list.

Last year when I started OurEcho, if you typed “Scott Lupo” into Google, my OurEcho biography would appear on the 10th page. If you type my name into Google today, I’m first on the list. But it is not just my name, but everyone on OurEcho who is moving up the search engine rankings. The statistics below show the percentages of page views on OurEcho that come from search engines. As you can see, it just keeps getting better.

2006 Results

January 0.9%
February 3.2%
March 3.5%
April 3.7%
May 4.8%
June 4.2%
July 5.7%
August 7.2%
September 8.6%
October 9.8%
November 19.6%

Search Engine Optimization goes way beyond site references and relative importance and I also have other tricks up my sleeve like meta tags and web page title optimization. Hopefully this hasn’t been too boring or confusing, but just know we are constantly working on ways to improve search rankings.

Story ID:	1286
Written by:	OurEcho Admin (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	OurEcho Announcement
Location:	Atlanta Georgia USA
Year:	2006
Person:	OurEcho