SortFix Powered Search Blog

SEO is a very up-to-date industry. The search algorithms evolve constantly; competition is great and very dynamic. One of the key factors that has an impact on SEO is search engine algorithms, and more specifically, Google’s page rank. In this post, we will review some of the current views and recommendations, and take a look at a few past views that are still very relevant in 2009.

I had the idea for this post when I found a blog post from March 2005 at Search EngineLand by Christine Churchill on search engine algorithms. This four year old post is still relevant.  Although the examples there are for Ask Jeeves, they mostly apply for Google also. According to this post, the two main factors that impact searches are content and linkage. These still very much apply. Content is of course a key factor, due to the fact that search engines rely on text analysis and the relevance of the content to its segment/industry. Linkage, the second factor, influence the level of relevance (and relationships) that is determined by the search engine.While main search engines analyze the content and the linkage relationships, users are still left to produce their own search query, which we know is increasing in length but still quite low (3.3 words). This means, in most cases, users type a search query and the search engines retrieve results which are not necessary the most relevant results, due to the fact that the search query was very short. This problem was described beautifully by Mike Grehan, CEO of Smart Interactive, in the same post: “A customer walks into a huge travel outfitters store, with every type of item, for vacations anywhere in the world, looks at the guy who works there, and blurts out, ‘Travel.’ Now where’s that sales clerk supposed to begin?” This is still very relevant today.

As interesting as all that is, there have been tremendous changes since then in search engine algorithms and the influences on SEO. One of the influences talked about recently is the importance of new and fresh content. As stated very well by Brandon Leibowitz for Pandia Search engine news, new and fresh content is favored by search engines more than existing content. Brandon emphasizes the importance of refreshing content for better page ranking by search engines. This means not only changing designs and templates, but completely changing existing content as well as constantly adding new content.

On searching for new content, Sortfix has an edge also. We can expect that the more new content that is produced, the more we will see personalized search queries. Other search tools that try to personalize search use past data to suggest and produce search queries, which isn’t very effective in locating new queries the search engine has never seen. Sortfix’s Power Words retrieves key words and phrases from the current online search results, which can help users retrieve much more relevant results for search queries. SEO experts can also use Power Words for keyword analysis as described here by Yohay Elam.

SEO is a dynamic, evolving industry. But, as we can see, from those insights written in 2005, SortFix keeps up with these changes and is very relevant for today’s SEO considerations.

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