Chapter 4. Tracking Words—SEO and Paid Search
Search, whether SEO, paid search, or site search, is a word problem.
While in the previous chapters we have looked at some mathematical formulas you can use to capture and track the results of your various search activities, search is really a very complex word problem. When you think about it, it’s actually pretty amazing what the search engines do, how well they do it, and how frequently. Consider how much content the search engines have indexed. There are over one trillion unique URLs on the Internet (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html), and from that content, the search engines are able to pluck out the best page that represents a given term in the blink of an eye. When I put the term “coffee” into Google’s search box, it returns that result in 0.16 seconds—that’s pretty impressive (Figure 4-1). Not only that, but the search engine also maps where the nearest coffee shops to me are located. Unreal.
Suppose your website is all about coffee. If one of your pages appears in the results list when someone types “coffee” into a search engine’s query box, you have already accomplished a lot. As you can see in Figure 4-1, there are some 230,000,000 other pages also competing on this one word. That’s a lot of pages about coffee! When you see those results you may say to yourself, “But I’ve got the best page ever on coffee, and Wikipedia ranks number 1?” Yes, yes it does, and for a number of reasons (with the biggest ...