SEPOV is an acronym for “Search Engine Point of View”; It is typically used in the context of discussions about search engine optimization (SEO). If you really want to tackle SEO with confidence, you should learn to look at your website from the perspective of the search engine spider and consider your motivation (if you’ll excuse a little anthropomorphism).
Fortunately, search engine spiders are actually pretty simple creatures.
What is my motivation?
In fact, there is a simple, central, and obvious search engine truth that everything else stems from: the popularity of a search engine is directly related to the quality of its results.
Never forget this truth. Do not minimize its importance or allow yourself to think that it is simplistic. Those trying to predict what Google is going to do next are wringing their hands and spending a lot of money. The simple fact is that all search engines will do what they have always done and always will, that is, try to improve the quality of their results.
Google rose to fame because its results were the best. Its main user interface was (and still is) ridiculously simple. His results were simply better than everyone else’s. And they still are, although Yahoo and Microsoft are gradually closing the technical gap.
The motivation of the search engine spider is therefore that of its creators: to find valuable information so that the rest of the search engine software can provide good results.
All major search engines apply advanced contextual analysis to return links to pages that have the most high-quality information about specific search terms. Think about that statement again for a moment, “… link back to pages that have the most high-quality information on specific search terms.”
There are profound implications to that simple statement that the vast majority of website designers simply overlook.
Go to the bottom
For a given web page, depth is more important than breadth. Too much information on one topic is much, much better than little information on many topics. When the Google spider is examining one of your web pages, it must convince it of two things:
1. Your page has a lot of information about search terms. That is, it is relevant to the search query.
2. Your page has good information about search terms (it has high quality or authority)
Of those sites that are relevant and authoritative, Google makes one last value judgment: Freshness. The site with the most recently updated content wins.
Playing favorites
Research has also shown that search engines in general and Google in particular tend to favor websites that have one or more keywords in their URL. For example, one of the reasons I liked the domain name “web-marketing-advisor.com” is that it contained some of my main keywords right in the name.
If your website has the keyword in the URL, it also implies that depth is more important than breadth for an entire website, as you will want every page on the site to be highly relevant to the keywords in the title. .
In other words, in my opinion, it is better to have multiple sites, each of which focuses on a narrowly defined topic than one site that has a many-topic shooting focus.
Coming soon in the next installment: Spiders are more human than you think!