#27520
For years, 'link popularity' and 'Google PageRank' have been the talk of the town in the search engine optimization community. However, the definition of link popularity and how it differs from PageRank (PR), as well as how much effect these actually have on search engine rankings, is often misunderstood.
Whalen, Jill. High Rankings Advisor (2004). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#24362
Link Popularity: Who Should You Link To
Find out who you should be linking to in order to optimise your link popularity.
Goetsch, Daria. Webcredible (2004). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#19406
Linking vs. Searching: Guidelines for Use
Sanjay Koyani at the National Cancer Institute and I did a quick survey of the available literature on linking and searching. We organized our findings into a series of observations and guidelines that may be helpful to designers dealing with similar issues.
Bailey, Robert. Web Usability (2003). Design>Web Design>Search
#21734
The Web is big. A billion pages big, according to a recent study by Inktomi and the NEC Research Institute. It's the ultimate testing ground for information retrieval technologies. If your search engine can automatically bring order to this overwhelming global mess of stuff, just think what it can do for a single web site or intranet.
Morville, Peter. Argus Center (2000). Design>Web Design>Search
#28358
Why haven't we figured out search yet? Amanda Spink talks with Christina Wodtke on why searchers still can't ask a useful question of a search engine, and how Google may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Boxes and Arrows (2006). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Search
#27519
The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns.
Whalen, Jill. High Rankings Advisor (2004). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Search Engine Optimization
#21202
Meta Tags: What Are They and Which Search Engines Use Them?
Defining Meta Tags is much easier than explaining how they are used, and by which engines.
Zwicky, Richard. Metamend (2003). Design>Web Design>Search>Metadata
#24620
My CMS Ate My Search Engine Rankings
A dynamically-delivered site in and of itself need not denigrate your search engine rankings. Google and other spiders can follow dynamically-generated pages, up to a point. The key is to have links elsewhere on the site pointing specifically to those pages. If each page results from a purely dynamic query (e.g. using session variables), then you could be in trouble.
Byrne, Tony. CMSworks (2004). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Search
#23249
The Myth of "Guaranteed #1 Ranking" in Search Engine Marketing
No one can guarantee you a number one placement in the search engines - find out why.
Webcredible (2003). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#14624
The author offers advice on choosing the most appropriate search engine, as well as a list of tips for using search engines.
Archee, Raymond K. Intercom (2000). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search
#27515
No Quick Fixes Where Search Engine Optimization is Concerned
There are simply no quick fixes regarding search engine optimization. Adding META tags on your site neither a quick fix nor a slow fix. It won't fix anything and it won't have any effect on your search engine traffic.
Whalen, Jill. High Rankings Advisor (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#24011
Of Robots and a New Search Engine
On July 1995, shortly after the EEI Web site opened, it began to be accessed by a computer named scooter.pa-x.dec.com . At first I thought that someone at Digital Equipment Corporation had an extraordinary interest in editorial subjects, but it soon became clear that Scooter was a robot, a computer program set up to retrieve Web pages. In some months, Scooter accessed more of our pages than any other visitor. I was curious, but since it wasn't doing any harm, I never investigated it. On December 15, 1995, the AltaVista Web site opened, and we finally got to see what Scooter had been up to.
Ivey, Keith C. Editorial Eye, The (1996). Design>Web Design>Search
#26495
Online SEO Information: Trick or Treat?
People come to SEO from other disciplines, such as development and design. Many think there are some magic tags you stick in pages to make them fly up search engines' results pages. They ask me about coding: can search engines read it, and where's the best place to put this or that tag for better ranking? They appear at a loss when I explain coding's just not that important, as long as a crawler can get to the pages and parse the text out of them.
Grehan, Mike. ClickZ (2005). Design>Web Design>Search
#24154
Page Cloaking - To Cloak or Not to Cloak
Page cloaking can broadly be defined as a technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances. There are two primary reasons that people use page cloaking.
Roy, Sumantra. 1stSearchRanking (2003). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>Search
#27607
The Page Title and Meta Description
Never underestimate the importance of the page title and meta description - they're used by both search engines and people to judge your website.
Usborne, Nick. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#23245
Pay-Per-Click: Buying Your Way In
The Pay-per-click search industry is booming! Find out how you too can get involved in this low-cost high-return form of advertising.
Kohler, Ed. Webcredible (2004). Design>Web Design>Search
#14206
People Search Once, Maybe Twice
Lately, we've been focused on the effectiveness of Search. When looking for content, users often end up using the search engine. In a recent study, we observed that users only found their target content 34% of the time with Search (less than with categories). We wanted to know why.
User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search
#31128
What bugs me is not the results of the major search engines, but the results of internal web site searches.
Rockley Group, The (2008). Design>Web Design>Search>Usability
#26633
Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search
#28053
The Real Costs of "Free" Search Site Services
When owners of the big money tree use their excess profits to subsidize unrelated services, independent software vendors (ISVs) are driven out of business. Although such behavior got Microsoft into trouble in the past, ISVs shouldn't expect relief from search-engine-sponsored software from the U.S. Justice Department or the European Commission any time soon. These government agencies are notoriously behind the times, as proven by the fact that they attacked Microsoft only after it had won the browser war by cutting off Netscape's air supply.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search
#27516
Realistic Search Engine Optimization Expectations
Even keyword phrases that nobody's searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you're doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day, and gone the next.
Whalen, Jill. High Rankings Advisor (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#24753
Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior with Search User Interfaces for the Web 
Current search interfaces reflect the inner workings of search technology rather than what we know about how people look for information.
Rose, Daniel E. Earthlink (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Search
#19675
Since the failure of banner advertising as a revenue source, the search engine and directory industry has changed drastically. Most search engines now require payment to include sites in their databases. But there are still a lot of search engines that allow you to register your site for free.
Leonard-Wilkinson, Theresa A. Intercom (2003). Design>Web Design>Search
#24198
Last fall, one of the people I mentor, Andrew White, e-mailed me, asking how to get his site ranking higher on Google. He is the webmaster for a church Web site and was not happy that another church site with the same name outranked his site. I looked over his keywords and site text: He did not have very strong keywords. His primary keyword phrase was the name of his church. I wondered about this: How many people search for the name of a church? If you want your efforts at search engine optimization (SEO) to bear fruit, be it an organic campaign, a paid sponsorship, or Google Adwords, you must choose the keywords that your target audience is using to find your site or product. Otherwise all your efforts are in vain.
Leonard-Wilkinson, Theresa A. Intercom (2004). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#31396
RSS, Search Engine Visibility and Brand Perception
Branding has been called the most powerful idea in business, yet few companies consciously craft and promote their brand. Making a brand visible to an online audience can be an additional challenge. Studies show that searchers regard the companies that are placed on the first page of search engine results as the major players in the field. So how do you get the coveted page-one positioning? New technologies like RSS feeds are one way to accomplish this and make your brand more visible in the process.
Falkow, Sally. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Web Design>XML>Search Engine Optimization
