" The Philosophy of Ranking First "

The Philosophy of Ranking First

A short post from yellowwing, an SEW member from up north in Winnipeg, had this to say today:

I've taken the philospohy of SEO as 90% Linguistics and 10% Math. Beat the competition, not the search engine. It is much easier to analyze other sites than to reverse engineer what the vast team of Google Phd's (sic) have come up with lately.

 

This brings up an interesting perspective about the two ways that SEOs approach their dilemna. In my experience, simply beating the competition (at least at Google) is not enough these days to rank at the top. You must obliterate the competition, in terms of quality and quantity of both content and links.

This could be due to the much maligned 'sandbox' that Google has many sites in, or it could be simply a matter of getting enough attention. In either case, the same hard effort is neccessary to compete.

Tools and resources that help SEOs do it both ways - the link analyzer tool is certainly a competition based analysis system, whereas the FAQs and advanced articles take a more in-depth exploration at the search engines' preferences in general.

For my part, I prefer to know as much about the search engines as possible. It's why I've been spending so much of my time reading white papers and research articles from IR researchers and search engineers - getting an understanding of the mindset and plave where the designers of technology come from is, to me, invaluable.