The BitWorm SEO Blog

The most common reason to use a friendly URL for search engine optimization has to do with keywords the URL giving the page a boost for searches with those terms.  While that seems to be true,  there is an additional reason that I don’t see discussed often.  The Human Algorithm.

First, what’s a friendly URL?  Let’s look at an example:

http://www.bitworm.com/search/2008/long-tail-keywords/

vs.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050314-164653

If you search for something related to the “long tail”, saw those two in the search results, which would you click?  Why?  Your “human algorithm” probably decided the first one is more relevant than the second, even though both pages in reality have to do with the long tail of search.

I know, there is more to the search results than just the url.  The are:

1. The Title
2. The Description
3. The URL

The battle for search traffic is not about ranking well.  Really, it’s not!  It’s about ranking well AND getting people to click your listing.

Your best chance of getting a click, especially if you don’t rank #1 for a phrase, is to have all three items (title, description, url) targeted to trigger the human brain to see relevance to the search intent.

It’s the human algorithm.  

Just as a search engine makes split second judgements to decide which 10 pages out of a billion are most relevent to a query, the human algorithm takes those ten results and determines which page to click.  

For me, and I’m sure many other searchers as well, this process happens in a second or two.  In that short amount of time, I know I’m not reading every single word being returned, but my brain quickly scans for signals of relevance and quality to chooses a page to click.  Keywords in the URL is one of those signs of relevance.  

Your goal is to not only be at the top of the search engine algorithm, but the human algorithm as well.  Friendly URLs help with both.

I just read an interesting post over at SEO Bandy about valid code giving a significant boost in the search engine rankings.  In a way it makes perfect sense, and in a way it’s hard to believe.

What makes this more interesting is that there are roots in a Matt Cutts quote.  Matt is in an interesting position.  He knows a lot of ranking information he can’t directly talk about.  That’s why his words are examined by SEO’s is if this were Wall Street disecting the words of the Fed Chairman.  Could be nothing, or he could know a lot more than he’s letting on.

I’d agrue returning “valid” pages is in Google’s best interest in terms of generic page quality.  A web page that passes HTML validation should in theory render well in any web browser a searcher happens to be using.  If a page isn’t valid, it’s a gamble whether the page will render for the searcher, although in practice the vast majority will render well enough.

From that standpoint, I can see why Google may give a boost to valid pages.

On the flip side, experience tells me that the vast majority of pages on the Internet won’t pass a validation test.  Sure, most are very close to valid, but few actually pass.

I’ve thought for a long time that there is a certain quality bar that needs to be crossed.  For example, I wrote a crawler recently which collected some key stats for every page on a site.  I was suprised to find a handful of pages where the resulting info just didn’t make any sense.  On investigation, it seems extra body tags were the culprate.

My crawler established it’s own quality bar.  Each of those pages with extra body tags would have been improperly indexed by my crawler, and possibly Google’s as well.

So, is having code that passed validation really a factor?  Is this why I never run into “best view on Internet Explorer” pages any more?  I don’t think the experience of SEO Bandy is enough to base a decision and reaction on…but I smell a SEO test in my future.

Google’s chrome isn’t a direct attack on Microsoft, unlike what the general consensus of many news agencies and blogs seem to be reporting. 

At least, it isn’t any more of an attack than Ford’s Model T was an direct attack against buggy whip manufacturers.  Ford didn’t set out to hurt the buggy whip companies, but rather to make a car everyone could afford.

Might Microsoft be hurt?  Probably.  However, any pain would be collateral damage due to lack of their own proactive action.  Words mean things.  “Attack” is a word that implies intent.  I don’t think that’s present here, or at least not as a primary driving factor.

Let’s look at the current day reality of the browser market and Google apps.

Google makes advanced web applications that push the limits of the current browser technology, just like how Microsoft’s Windows OS pushed the limits of Intel’s hardware with each release.  Moore’s law is a great thing for Microsoft.  The hardware keeps get better by orders of magnitude.

Here’s the rub – Google has pushed the limits of the current generation of web browsers, while the browser technology has stood still.  Yes, FireFox 3 is an improvement, as is the IE8 beta, but they’re both merely a step in the right direction, not the leap that is needed…and Google’s apps still don’t have any head-room.

Google needs drastic improvements in certain features to push their overall apps and technologies forward.  They’ve been waiting a while, and the market hasn’t responded, so they’ve decided to take matters into their own hands. 

The browser being Open Source is evidence of this.  They don’t really want to “own” this thing, but they know they need it badly enough to make it themselves.

To Microsoft, this may look like an attack.  From my view of the current browser market, it’s a company that is reliant on a commodity product deciding the commodity quality is not acceptable, and taking action in the most direct way possible.