RedWrit.com | SEO Content Writers, SEO Articles and Website Copy

If there’s one thing that I despise in life, it’s constantly explaining to the Internet illiterate (or computer illiterate) exactly what kind of a writer I am. It’s not enough to say that I write for Internet marketing or to improve the rank of websites, without understanding the basics of how Google works you will never fully understand why there is such a high and ever-increasing demand for high quality content on the web. Nearly every time I run into someone new, I’m forced to explain Google and how it ranks websites. I’ve done it enough I think I have it down to a science that even my grandmother can understand. For someone who had a bit of a struggle understanding the concept of the “double click” not so long ago, that must mean it’s pretty broken down. If you’ve been in SEO for a while there has certainly been a time when someone explaining the world of search engine optimization has gone over your head or they focus on specific practices instead of general rules. This is the fault of almost all of us that work in SEO, it’s a never-ending pool of knowledge and tactics and tricks that help us get sites to the top, yet the principles behind doing so are very, very simple. It’s easiest to look at it in chronological order.

Google in the beginning — the battle with Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista

Many of those familiar with the entrepreneurship community know the basic story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Stanford students were determined that there must be a better way to rank websites than what was around at the time. During the time before Google there were basically two alternatives, Yahoo, which was the world’s largest search directory, and search engines we would laugh at now, such as Lycos and AltaVista.

Lycos and AltaVista, among others, would allow webmasters to submit their website to their database. Once they were in this database, programs called “crawlers” “spiders” or simply “robots” would see how many times different words appeared on each website and rank them according to how many times the word appeared.

Yahoo felt this was too easy to manipulate, and instead employed “gatekeepers.” Gatekeepers were real humans who would actually try to find the best websites in each category and would manually rank them on the Yahoo homepage. Since these rankings were generally much more reliable than the ones that were computer generated, Yahoo slowly began to dominate the Internet.

Citational Analysis

Page and Brin felt there must be a better and more efficient way to decide which websites were the best. The best websites would be the most specific to what the user is looking for. They should be authoritative and trustworthy. They stumbled upon what is called “citational analysis” from academic papers.

Academic papers are required to source any other papers they use information from. Based on this, citational analysis was developed to try and determine which were the most authoritative. Thousands of papers, for example, would cite Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Therefore, that paper would be considered the most authoritative, the most trustworthy, and overall the “best” academic paper. Each time you cite someone else’s paper, it’s like a vote. Whoever gets the most votes wins, and Internet democracy is born.

Although there are no specified formats on the Internet for sourcing content, the Internet does have a built-in method of noting works cited. It has links. A hyperlink, also known as a link, are the buttons you can click on the Internet that will take you to another website. The code that is required to make a link is very trackable, and is also very similar to a vote. So what, Larry Brin and Page thought, would happen, if you ranked websites according to how many “votes” or links they had, instead of having someone manually rank them or instead of looking strictly at what is on the website itself. With this new formula, Google began to reshape the Internet.

The Introduction of PageRank

The new formula worked like a charm, yet Google noticed that over time people were beginning to manipulate it. While links were very useful in determining which website should be ranked, a website with links is much more easy to create than an academic paper with sources. So what happens when someone, instead of making a website worth linking to, goes out and creates those links on their own? A website takes minutes to create, so a program could create thousands of websites that all link to your website, and you have just created votes out of nowhere, all of which vote for you.

Google decided that the best way to fight this new form of what we call “black hat SEO” (or trying to beat the system) could be taken down if somehow you could determine how trustworthy the sites were that were linking to other sites. Google created PageRank, a 0 to 10 score of how trustworthy your site is. Like the Google algorithm, nobody knows exactly how this ranking works, but A/B testing has shown that the more links you have from trustworthy sites the higher your PageRank goes up.

So now the battle isn’t just to get links, it’s to get links from quality sources. Some have estimated a link from a PageRank 1 site will give your Google ranking as 100 PageRank 0 links would.

Article Marketing – Getting Links

Hypothetically the idea behind the Google ranking would be that one should create a website so fantastic that everyone loves it and starts linking to it. Once those links start coming in the site would rise up in the search rankings.

But waiting for these links to come in is like building a store in the desert and waiting for the shoppers to flow in. By the time the shoppers are showing up we will have lost a lot of business.

So what can we do on the Internet? We can write content. We write content that describes different aspects of our business, designed to help the consumer, and including links back to our website. Article submission engines will accept these articles (some have very high PageRanks), and in exchange for us creating the content for them will give our website a little bit of “link juice.”

The content has to be unique (it can’t be copied and pasted), and it has to be something another person would enjoy reading enough to say, “I approve of this, and therefore I approve of whatever website wrote it.”

So that’s what article marketing is. I write content so good people put it on their website and refer their users to mine. And it works.