The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (that's really no secret at all)

How I despise those awful, cheesy pages promoting the "secrets" of search engine optimization. How I loathe the slick salesman pictured in fuzzy, 1980's-style photography promising you "the hidden tactics SEOs don't wan't you to know." When most search folks think of the "ultimate secret" in SEO," they probably think about one of these:

• Keywords in the Title Tag
• Spiderable Links & Content
• Anchor Text in Links
• Links from Quality Websites

Those are all good pieces of advice, and important to high rankings, but even the last one (links from quality websites) doesn't convey the most important part of successful ranking campaigns. If there is one key to high search engine rankings, a single piece of advice that unlocks the door to the top of Google & Yahoo! it's this: Your website must appeal to a link-savvy audience.

Simple? Sadly, no. The truth is that the very best website in the world that sells your product, offers your content or promotes your cause may not be good enough to make it to the top of the engines. Why? Because the world of search has an inherent bias to those sites with more links. It's not enough to build links now through manual link requests or link buying, nor is it enough to bolster these link acquisitions with a flawlessly "optimized" website filled with keyword-targeted pages. These strategies, while effective in the short term, won't guarantee you success in the long run. To have a shot at keeping the top positions for years to come, you need a strategy that naturally drives links to your site again and again. The "secret" is that the audience most sites appeal to is NOT the same audience that provides links, yet this group (the Linkerati) has the power to make or break a site's rankings.

Let's walk through a brief history of search engines to see how this happened:

No, Hotbot Monster, back in the early days, you really weren't. Measuring repetition of keywords and keyword placement and density led to some pretty bad results and a lot of cloaking and spamming.

With the arrival of Google's PageRank and Apostolos Gerasoulis' Teoma (now called ExpertRank), the search engines got smarter, mapping the link patterns of the web and giving higher ranks to those sites & pages with more inbound links.

Over the last 8 years, the engines have been refining the way they measure links, taking into account context, relevance, trust and other metrics to help indicate which links are worth counting towards a particular ranking.

All of this algorithmic evolution means that sites wishing to rank at the top of the engines must have high quality, naturally given, topically relevant links. Since search rankings are so valuable, massive amounts of time and money pour into campaigns for the most competitive queries, making the struggle for placement increasingly difficult. This brings us to the fundamental issue that site creators struggle against - segmenting visitors accurately and appealing to the "Linkerati."

Above are three groups of visitors, applicable to nearly every commercial or goal-oriented website in existence. While most sites do a reasonable job identifying and targeting the 2nd group (in blue) from the first (in green), this isn't the case with the 3rd group (in red). Those red Llinkerati are essential to your site's rankings - they are the great "secret" of long-term SEO success. In order to leverage their power, you must create compelling content that appeals to their desires. This really is no "secret" at all. In every interview and on every stage, you'll hear representatives from Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask repeat this same mantra (albeit without the benefit of colorful diagrams). As an example:

"...the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward." - Matt Cutts in an interview with Gord Hotchkiss

Why are these Linkerati so powerful? What makes their opinions and influence so important to average website owners? Easy - the power to control the web's link structure.

The web's content may still be overwhelmingly commercial and organizational in scope, controlled by exceutives at companies, museum curators, government taxonomists, etc. But, the link landscape of the web, particularly those links that point externally from sites, are dominated by the Linkerati. If your competitors or even organizations like Wikipedia, About.com, niche bloggers or industry news publications become more popular with the Linkerati than you, how can you ever expect to compete for search engine rankings?

This is the great "secret" of SEO - that (at least) some content on your website must be targeted to the Linkerati - fulfilling their unquenchable thirst for new material to link to and share and spread virally. Although they may be a vastly different population than your customers, you need their respect and approval in order to continue to draw in targeted leads from the engines.

I know the next question - What do the linkerati want? Well, it's after midnight and I have lots of work to do before I can go to bed, so you'll have to stay tuned until tomorrow. Sorry!