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There are only a handful of people on the Internet that I really pay attention to. Aaron Wall is one of those people.

He’s a legend. When it comes to search optimization and marketing, A-Wall might just be the Michael Jordan of SEO. He’s pretty much in a class by himself, and just like Drudge drives the news cycle, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that Aaron Wall is the leading edge of the SEO industry, setting precedents, methods and standards that the rest of us will use for years to come.

In addition to his legendary status, Aaron Wall also hosts some of the industry’s best free online seo tools and just recently he opened himself up to virtual apprenticeship (who wouldn’t want to study with the master!) through his online training class. If you haven’t visited SEOBook…let’s just say you should. Just like every Wii owner MUST own Mario Galaxy and Smash Brothers, every Internet Professional MUST follow Aaron Wall.

So enough of the gushing;-) This past week I asked Aaron Wall a question that has been pressing on my mind for the last few months. He took the time to give a very insightful and thorough response. The moral of the story for the average blogger stays the same: create quality editorial content that differentiates and “thickens” your site and you’ll most likely survive any major changes to search that occur in the future.

Pease enjoy.

Will the semantic web change search? Yes. Will it have much effect on the average blogger or small time webmaster? Probably not, IMHO. Will it have much effect on larger website? Yes.

The thing about semantic search is that if it is widely adopted, it keeps pushing more value away from end publishers and toward the central information aggregators. This, in turn, kills thin listing styled businesses by sending all of their value to the search engines. Just look at how Google local recently expanded to show 10 local results above the organic search results for local search queries. That expansion occurred AFTER traditional yellow page companies like RHD and IAR lost over 90% of their market value (by stock price) in the last year. So if you are running a thin listing type website make sure you thicken it up with unique editorial content and/or user reviews.

Google mobile recently quietly launched a mobile directory service ( http://www.google.com/m/lcb ). If you are a local business you can try your best to make sure that it is categorized properly in these databases.

Shopping related search queries are about 10% of all search queries. Where I see semantic search eventually heading is some of the larger merchants will plug their inventory into Google and tell Google to sell it at x price and to target ads which guarantee y % profit margin. That is perhaps 5 years down the road though.

So if semantic search keeps driving value to search engines which types of sites will withstand the gravity of such a move? Likely sites that are destinations themselves, which have great editorial content that people subscribe to, and thought leadership positions over important keywords.

Semantic search is all about tags and language. If you know your market well you can profit from the mutation of language and growth of new words. Give trends a meaningful idea worth spreading and when the ideas spread the value of your market position goes up. In addition you can register associated domain names to further cement your position as having some form of ownership over certain keywords.

Some independent entrepreneurs will create vertical search engines based on semantic web information. Most of them will fail, but perhaps a couple of them will win enough marketshare to get bought out by Google or another large web company. The ones that do gain enough marketshare to get bought out will likely have an embeddable feature that many other webmasters use to embed the content into their sites.

cheers
aaron

Why should anyone bother linking to other content on another website? Why send people other places when you could include internal links only? These readers should stay on my site! So, forget about linking out, and as a result, those visitors should stick around longer. Well, not so fast — if that were true, then why would any site have external links?

This all leads up to the question of why should a blogger even bother with linking out to other pages? Well, there are plenty of reasons, and some of you might be shocked to learn that outbound links can actually help your blog to grow in more ways than one. It might take time, but here are a few reasons why linking to other quality content is a great idea.

Communication

Most smaller sites owners would very much appreciate a link to them for the hard work they must do to stand out in the crowd. I made it a habit when I started blogging to check my visitor statistics on a daily basis, and I took note of any larger blogs or news sites that would link to me. However, I noticed that I would acknowledge this with a link back to the referring article. Now, regardless of whether or not I’m just a nice guy or was hoping to get future links from any particular site, at the very least it established some communication.

Appreciation = Backlinks?

If you think about it, this is an excellent way to build links to your blog because if your blog is larger than that of the one you are linking to, the blog owner might be inclined to simply post a link back to the article that was referencing his or her blog. If you use your imagination, you can imagine how many links can be built back to your site simply by linking to another author’s content. Do this long enough, and all those generated backlinks will be valuable in the long run.

Giving Credit and Fact Checking

Remember back in school when you had to include a works cited page for your reports — I generally disliked (okay, honestly, I flat-out hated) creating those, but thankfully, with the development of the internet, we rarely have to deal with those nowadays. A link can act as verification and fact checking for your work — it is all inline. If your writing an opinionated article, you could use links to reference other material that will help you support your argument. Again, it is also a way to allow your readers to check the facts as well.

Sharing Great Content

There just comes a time when a blogger needs to share something amazing he or she has discovered on the web. This happens a lot on the blogosphere as word travels quickly (especially with sites like Digg and Reddit around). Directing your readers to amazing content will give readers the opportunity to see the other author’s hard work, but will also add value to the referring blog. It could generate backlinks, and the readers will likely appreciate the discovery of quality content elsewhere.

Other creative reasons for linking out:

• Point readers to a site that explains content which a particular blogger might not fully understand
• Link to other content the author has written elsewhere
• Link to a company, service, or product that is being discussed
• Link to content that will compliment existing content (e.g. an image or video)

So, as you can see, linking out can be a great way to help out readers, but also a way to help a blog to grow. Keep in mind that links should be beneficial to the readers — if a particular link is not useful, then don’t use it. Far too many links can appear overwhelming or even spammy. Not many people would appreciate that. However, using links correctly is just one more step to becoming a great blogger.

As most of you reading this will know, search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the art of promoting websites in order to achieve high levels of traffic and visibility from ‘organic’ web searches. The ideal outcome of good SEO is to appear as high as possible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for key words and phrases.

I am not an expert on SEO. Until two weeks ago I couldn’t have told you the importance of good SERPS (or even what that meant!), how simple SEO changes can make a difference or even who Matt Cuts or Rand Fishkin or Aaron Walls are. I am most definitely not a substitute for top quality SEO training. What I can offer is a fresh pair of eyes and a beginners perspective on SEO and some of the most important things to take away in the early days when faced with massive treasure trove of information that is available.

Three core practices of SEO

There are three principles that are central to most SEO texts I have read:

1. Understand how your pages will look to a search engine spiderMost search engines index content through the use of web-crawling software called ‘spiders’. Most of the time this is done without human intervention at all. As spiders only search text (which includes things such as alt variables in image tags), it is important for you to know how your page looks when only scanning the page source. This understanding allows you to tailor your content for machine scanning while still keeping it attractive for your human readers.
2. Have the how-to knowledge and the access to change your pages in order to optimise results for each search engine you want to rank highly onSEO is not a set once and forget type of activity. It requires a lot of fine tuning and tweaking in the early days so you need to be able to have the access to make constant changes to how your pages are set up, which requires both the knowledge on how to do it and the access to your server to make the changes. One happy side benefit of these SEO changes is that they can often make your site easier for humans to read/search/understand as well.
3. Stay away from Black hat activities if you are in it for the long haul The search engines are not at all shy about penalising or even banning sites they feel are gaming the system and abusing the search engine guidelines. If short-term ‘cut and run’ gain is your aim, I guess black hat stuff might be for you. If you are looking to build a long-term investment with authority and status, you should think twice before delving in to the darker arts.

A top notch collection of SEO tools to help you practice these core principles are available at SEOBook.

White Hat v Black Hat

If you’re as new to this as I am, talk about ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO can be confusing. Just like in a classic Western flick, white hats are the good guys and black hats are the bad guys. If it seems very Spy vs Spy well, that is because it sort of  is when you think about it.

White Hats

White hats tend to follow the guidelines of a search engine and try and stay within the rules. The aim here is to have quality content for users as a base and then work out the best way to make the site attractive and accessible to spiders and other search engine crawling mechanisms. The aim of the game here is to build authority. White hat is the long term view with the long term payoff.

Black Hats

Black hat activity is all about circumventing the rules, often for short term gain. Short term gain is the key here as black hats have to keep one step ahead of the game as the search engines keep changing the rules and tweaking their algorithms to shut them out. Some black hat techniques include using hidden text (for example tiny fonts or text the same colour as background) and ‘cloaking’, or making a web page look totally different depending on whether it is being looked at by a spider or a normal web surfer.

There is an excellent conversation between a black hat SEO and a white hat SEO at SEOmoz that should provide you with a good overview of the different philosophies.

Looking forward

My short summary above covers only a small part of the SEO industry but is a good place to start for the complete SEO newbie like myself. In the future, I will look at some basic design and optimisation issues that can make a substantial change in your blogging philosophy while remaining simple enough that even I can implement them without too much hassle.

Photo credit: vivalibre574