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Search Engine Optimization & PageRanks

https://www.optimizely.com/optimization-glossary/search-engine-optimization/

With the prevalence of digital platforms and online content, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) now becomes a critical component of the overall marketing strategy for many companies across industries. This concept of SEO is almost a direct response to the PageRank mechanisms we have been discussing in class. The online article I chose summarizes the key principles to achieve high rankings on Google search which is an application of the theories we talked about in Networks to real-life business practices.

This article first pointed out the importance of using links. It reasoned that links serve as “votes for quality” as website owners are unlikely to reference other websites of poor quality. Moreover, backlinks by sites that are authorities in the field can contribute even more to improving the web page rankings. These suggestions tie closely to the hub scores and authority scores we learned in class. When different sources (as nodes and information hubs in a graph) link to information centers (often as authorities in the graph), we can measure the influence of each site by calculating in-links and updating hub & authority values to adjust for the different qualities of sources/authorities. This page ranking mechanism explains the rationale behind positions such as outreach marketing or content partnership who seek opportunities to get featured by influential publications. The increased media exposure of certain online content can not only draw more traffic to the website but also help Google identify it as useful information, thus ranking higher on the search engine.

Besides building backlinks, this article also pointed out the importance of carefully architecting content. Specifically, it emphasizes repeating keywords and building relevant sub-topics (often keywords closely related to the major keywords the article is ranking for) for the article to get “picked up” by Google under certain search terms. Although we didn’t get to cover this in-depth in class, the professors mentioned the concept of relevance when discussing ad slots in class. When displaying search results, information relevance is crucial. As a result, repeating keywords serves as a way to help the search engines categorize the content. Moreover, the “searches related to xx” suggestions reveal how search engines are connecting relevant/similar search terms and making sense of the logical relationships between connected topics.

This online article helps me understand the application of the theories we learnt in class in real-life. It also reveals how businesses are strategizing around the search engine rules to improve their marketing performances.

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