Search Engine Optimization Secrets: Do What You Never Thought Possible with SEO

Chapter 2. Relearning How You See the Web

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Analyzing how a website fits in its "web neighborhood"

• Viewing websites like an SEO

• Assessing good site architecture and webpages from an SEO perspective

• Assessing website content like an SEO

When people surf the Internet, they generally view each domain as its own island of information. This works perfectly well for the average surfer but is a big mistake for beginner SEOs. Websites, whether they like it or not, are interconnected. This is a key perspective shift that is essential for understanding SEO.

Take Facebook, for example. It started out as a "walled garden" with all of its content hidden behind a login. It thought it could be different and remain completely independent. This worked for a while, and Facebook gained a lot of popularity. Eventually, an ex-Googler and his friend became fed up with the locked-down communication silo of Facebook and started a wide open website called Twitter. Twitter grew even faster than Facebook and challenged it as the media darling. Twitter was smart and made its content readily available to both developers (through APIs) and search engines (through indexable content).

Facebook responded with Facebook Connect (which enables people to log in to Facebook through other websites) and opened its chat protocol so its users could communicate outside of the Facebook domain. It also made a limited amount of information about users visible to search engines. Facebook is now accepting its place in ...