There has been a lot of chat in the past about whether SEO’s should read research papers around information retrieval and search. I think it is important, but perhaps not for all of the SEO’s out there. We don’t approach the business in the same way necessarily so for some it would be indeed a bit of a waste of time. This is a short list of reasons why SEO’s don’t need to know about how search engines work in any depth.
Give yourself 1 point for each one that applies. If it’s high, then you should ignore all research papers and posts about them.
1 – You don’t use the notion of LSA in any of your posts, articles or in your work
2 – You don’t refer to PageRank in any of your posts, articles or in your work
3 – You use link building and internal link structure based on rules proven to work in SEO alone
4 – You do not seek to improve your techniques as such but prefer to rely on those trusted ones which provide a clear ROI
5 – You would rather change your methods once they have been tested by other SEO’s rather than expect them in advance and try them yourself
6 – You have a family member on the board at Google (thank you David Harry)
7 – You find that organic search is just a side line to your PPC specialism
8 – You already know everything
9- You don’t use or refer to keyword density in any of your posts, articles or in your work
10 – You don’t write posts, articles or give tutorials on how search engines work (unless you focus on SEO techniques specifically)
11 - You don’t use or refer to “semantic” in any of your posts, articles or in your work
12 – You don’t refer to yourself as a “search engineer”
13 – You don’t use or refer to the “invisible web” in any of your posts, articles or in your work
14 – You are not passionate about search in particular (as opposed to SEO alone)
15 – You don’t think knowing how search engines work is important in the field of search engine optimization
16 – You don’t use or refer to web 2.0 or web 3.0 and so on in any of your posts, articles or in your work
Total points:……..
This list is obviously biased to a degree because you know that I regard being in touch with the research world as important, but at the same time I acknowledge the fact that not everyone else will have this view. I do think however that if you are in the business of making fertilizer for plant growth, you should know about plants. You wouldn’t need to be a professor in plant biology but you would need to be a very experienced gardener with some knowledge of fertilizers.
The term “search engine optimization” has the words “search engine” in it. I would therefore assume that one would have to know about search engines. I don’t think that knowing about them in huge depth is needed, but discussing LSA for example requires a degree of understanding that goes beyond the world of marketing for example.
You thankfully do not need to plough through tons of papers, which is very confusing when you’re new to the field and just want to understand rather than build your own search engine. You are fortunate enough to have places like Seo by the sea
, Huomah, SeoMoz, Geeking with Greg, and many others to go to. They cut through all the maths and complicated bits that are superfluous and give you the goods straight up.
On the flip side, it also doesn’t make sense to work in SEO and not have any notion of marketing. It goes without saying that you need to be well versed in that too. But that’s for another post.
hehe, ummm…. ok i agree that places like seoMOZ & seobook.com are great sources of information, but i find it is useful if you stumble across new directions their search engineers are looking have a quick review of atleast the summary what the report is about.
Just as your teacher at school didnt expect you to be an expert, you should always be learning, reading and improving yourself.
Even if you dont plan to be the next Rand Fishkin or Bruce Clay it might be useful if they do a post on the research paper who understand a little bit so you get the most from their post.
These research papers may not be something you can use now, but if u are speaking with a client who has also read that blog or heard that term used you may look stupid if you go WTF…
Have a look at the term referred to in this post “LSA” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis
or what i understand the term was “latent semantic indexing” “LSI”
There are some people who advise that if you dont rank for anything atm, dont stress in having to get LSI into the seo plan from day 1, if people are still working out what seo actually means and how does adwords actually work, dont complicate the conversation with LSI/LSA….
oh and why not follow my random thoughts and posts on twitter @thelostagency
Thanks for your comment David. LSA is what computer scientists call it. I wouldn’t go about using it at all in any of your seo work actually. I think that knowing about the research isn’t necessarily about educating clients – it’s about educating yourself as a professional. After all your doctor doesn’t tell you about how he knows you have tonsillitis in any depth. he does need to know all about it though!
Great post CJ. I agree with you that good SEO’s should have a strong working knowledge of search tech.
One thing to keep in mind though is that search engine papers and even engineers that implement the tech in question often can only tell you how something was done and how it should perform. That can be far different than reality.
Amusing list. I wonder how many people said yes to #15. But you left out, “you are too busy serving clients to read long documents”, and “you are too rich from all those #1 ranking you get to care”. That first one is my constant struggle and that second one is my constant wishful thinking.
Yes Craig that’s true to an extent. I think that reading the papers or rather keeping on top of developments let you know what to expect. PageRank took 2 odd years to be implemented after all. The brand thingy that happened was hardly a shock. I agree that not everything will be implemented and that not everything will be implemented exactly like it was described.
LOL – I guess for the 1st one, you have all those cool peeps who make it easy and dissect and read all the patents and papers for you, meaning that you just get posts to read. I read all my news in Google reader and catch up whilst in transit or whatever.
Reading the content of this website I feel very much at home. A proper scientific way to discuss search! Will I lose my commercial touch and go broke as a result? I guess we’ll find out.
Very interesting… thanks.
At least 5 people are keen on learning new things and always researching to keep up with the times. Otherwise we wouldnt have found this articles. There needs to be at least 1 day a week or research and readings – you deffinately need to find the edge to get your website as well as your clients website to the top of the results for the most competetive key phrases.
I have to agree with the reasoning that performing effective seo is helped by the knowledge about how search engines work. In any industry I like to know the business from the ground up as much as possible. My example would be if managing a restaurant I’d want to be able to strap on an apron and do dishes for a while, get some knowledge of each aspect of how the restaurant runs. This has to make me a better manager. Knowing how search engines work has to help to a certain extent in tailoring efforts in the competitive environment. Perhaps less contested keyword can get away with less for longer, but those that do have solid competition will need every edge they can get. Besides, if you are interested in search engine optimisation as a career, presumably you have some sort of fascination with the process, or you love the buzz you get from seeing sites you are working with appear on first page. In either case it would be hard not to want to know how a search engine works, that sure beats trial and error. It’s fine to copy the leading techniques but what if you hit on a new method that no one else knows yet? That would be a great feeling. I’m all for knowing what makes things tick.
Great post. Here
is a good article that adds some additional detail to the topic and a good set of links to the deep web search engines and other helpful sites.
I read white papers on algorithms and LSI as it gives me a greater insight into exactly how the engineers at the search engine HQ’s are thinking about their next wave of classification of data. As an online marketer, it pays, I feel to keep ahead of the game. of course, it can be a lot of work flicking through a white paper, but I find some of the terminologies and references quite useful in my work. I set up Google alerts to catch articles and blog posts “like this” to expand my knowledge, which in turn helps my clients and allows me to provide a better service to my clients.