How many SEO - ‘How many …’ queries people use
As with Monday’s post, the queries shown below are queries that people used to find content on SEO Theory. The user experience would have been determined by which articles the search engines presented to visitors, but in some cases I think the people found nothing substantive. These type of long-tail queries underscore just how important it is to understand that search engines don’t always produce the right answer, and that people don’t always just visit one result. How Many Anchor Text Links Do I Need? - There appears to be no content that directly addresses this question, which I admit is somewhat poorly phrased. I think the searcher wants to know how many text links they need for their site. Of course, that’s a highly subjective question. Some SEOs would blithely say “as many as you can get” (and they would be wrong to say so because at some point you’ll hit the top of your targeted query and you won’t need any more links).
For competitive queries, you usually need hundreds to thousands of links passing anchor text. What makes a query competitive? When the top ten sites are all beating the keywords to death in their on-page factors and they all have hundreds or thousands of links pointing to them, the query is competitive. SHOULD you build hundreds of links is another question altogether.
I find that to be a time-consuming, inefficient, and exhaustive practice. But that’s just my opinion.
In a hypercompetitive query, you’ll need tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of links.
How Many Anchor Text Links Per Page - How many outbound links per page depends on what the page is doing. Is this a page in a Web directory? Is this a page in your HTML sitemap? Is this a page listing your reciprocal link partners? Is this a page where you’re listing resources for your visitors?
If you’re wondering whether it helps or hinders your search optimization, or what the optimal number of outbound links should be, there is no definitive answer. It depends based on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re worried about hoarding PageRank you need to get your head examined.
If, however, you’re trying to create a useful resource for your visitors, then I would suggest that anywhere from 10 to 100 outbound links per page is reasonable.
How Many Backlink One Should Build Per Month - There are so many implicit statements in this question. People who want to know how many backlinks you should build in a month are usually either concerned about where they should stop autospamming other people’s sites with links OR they are concerned with figuring out how many links they need for success.
If you’re targeting one query and you think you can get 10,000 people to link to your site with helpful anchor text in one month, there is no reason not encourage them to link to your site.
If, however, you’re dropping links on other sites, exchanging links with other sites, or buying/renting links from other sites, understand that these links will not be embedded in primary page copy. They will be in easily identifiable page elements that collectively create a pattern, what we generally call a “footprint”. I don’t have a magic number for footprint link building. I just advise people to keep the footprints as small as possible.
The less you depend on the easy-to-obtain links, the less likely you’ll trip filters or incur penalties.
How Many External Links Does My Site Have - If your site is new you probably know about every link it has because you created them. If your site has been receiving traffic for at least a few months, you have no way of knowing how many links your site has. You can only find out how many links search tools are willing or able to report to you. Those search tools may throttle their link reports (like Google), seed them with non-existent links (like Yahoo!), or have only limited resources to draw from.
But let’s assume you could actually track every inbound link you have. What would that tell you?
Nothing useful from an SEO perspective. Knowing how many links you have doesn’t tell you which search engines are indexing those links or allowing them to pass value. Nor does knowing how many links you have tell you how much referral traffic you get from other sites.
Generally speaking, however, the more natural inbound links you have, the more likely people will find your site from other sites and/or through search.
I think a better question is to ask “How many of my external links were created without my knowledge?” Using the various link research tools to find links you did not create will at least tell you whether other people find your site to be interesting. If you cannot find links you had no previous knowledge of, you should consider revising your strategy.
How Many Fundamental Principles Are There - This is obviously an ambiguous question that may have no relevance to search engine optimization. For SEO, I have long advocated four fundamental principles of SEO: Visibility, Keyword Research, Content Organization, and Linking Strategies. Of course, there are other principles, such as metrics, competitive analysis, and so forth.
There is no universally agreed-upon list of fundamental principles of search engine optimization, but I think you’ll find a lot of agreement with at least three of my proposed fundamental principles. We don’t see much discussion of the concept of “search visibility” but SEO is really founded upon the principle of managing search visibility.
How Many Keywords Should I Put In Metatags 2008 - I think most people in the SEO community now advise that you focus more on the description meta tag and less on the keywords meta tag. If we include the title in the group of “meta tags”, then I would say you want to use no more than 2 or 3 targeted expressions in your title and description. Opinions vary on the keywords meta tag but if you’re embedding more than 10 expressions in that tag you’re probably wasting your effort.
How Many Links For SEO - This question reflects sentiments expressed in previous questions. The SEO community has gotten hung up on the whole link-building craze. It’s not necessary to build many links for most sites if the sites are optimized (link building is NOT search engine optimization, although it can play a role in the process).
The difference between optimizing a site with links and building links to game the search engines is simple: optimizing links don’t use competitive anchor text. You optimize through links by improving your crawl. Once you start running on the anchor text treadmill you’re not optimizing for search, you’re just trying to outrank the next guy.
Search engine optimization seeks to achieve the maximum potential return on investment. Link building just focuses on specific expressions. In other words, you can optimize for a LOT of search referrals OR you can build links hoping to compete for one or a small number of queries.
How many links do you need for SEO? Not nearly as many as the SEO community has been telling you for years. Most sites don’t need more than a few dozen links. If you’ve already built hundreds of links for a site that isn’t adding content on a daily basis, you can find better things to do with you time.
How Many Meta Tags? Google - To the best of my knowledge, Google looks at the following meta tags: Title, description, and google or robots. Google also looks at document declarations and similar tags to help determine which languages and font sets a site is using.
How Many Pages Is Competitive - Does this question mean, “How many pages do I need on a site before it will compete?” or does it mean, “How many pages do I need about a topic to compete for a keyword?”
Although I haven’t seen any 1-page sites in the SERPs recently, it’s impossible to know how many pages (or how many links) you need to compete for any given expression. You need to repeat and emphasize your keywords in a logical, natural fashion as much as possible. You can find very small sites outranking very large sites. You can find link-poor sites outranking link-rich sites.
In search engine optimization, you get two things to work with: links and content. The more content you create, the better. You can create content in depth (longer pages) or diversity (more pages) or both. If you’re competing in queries with link-rich sites, you can compensate for your scarce links (to a certain extent) through on-page factors. Most SEOs who depend on links don’t optimize their copy.
If you’re going up against sites that have rich, highly relevant copy, you probably need links. Number of pages is not really a factor that SEOs need to worry about. Number of links only becomes an issue when you have exhausted all reasonable possibilities with on-page optimization.
How Many Search Engines Are Available - My personal network receives search traffic from 60-100 services every month (search engines and directories). There are most likely several hundred, perhaps over 1,000 active search engines and general purpose directories around the Web (including all languages).
How Many Search Engines Are In The World - See previous question for my best estimate of how many search engines are in the world. Understand that I am arbitrarily excluding a large number of sites (many tens of thousands) that republish content from major directories and/or which feature custom search tools provided by the major search engines.
How Many Searches A Second Does Google Do? - Interesting question. I’m not sure I’ve seen Google publish that data. Google says 1 month = 2,629,743.83 seconds. Most estimates I’ve seen suggest Google is handling 3-4,000,000,000 queries per month. Just guestimating quickly, you could say Google probably handles 1200-1500 queries per second (on average).
How Many Sites Don’t Use SEO - I think the answer to that depends in part on how flexible you want to be with your defintion of “use SEO”. For example, most blogging platforms now incorporate some basic SEO measures (keyword tagging, titles in URLs, etc.). The NetCraft server survey estimates 182 million active hosts for October 2008. Technorati found 5 million active blogs in June 2008 out of an estimated 112 million blogs Technorati tracks (that estimate may change over time).
How much do the Netcraft and Technorati surveys overlap? I have no idea, but I suspect that perhaps 1/3 of all active hosts (domains and/or sub-domains) have blogs on them. Many millions more sites also use ecommerce-oriented Content Management Software (CMS) and other types of CMS packages that have, like blogs, adopted some basic SEO-helpful features.
While I hesitate to estimate that half of all hosts probably use some SEO features, I would feel comfortable estimating that perhaps 30-50% of all hosts probably use some SEO features.
On the other hand, the number of sites that have active search engine optimization campaigns within the past 2-5 years probably numbers in the very low millions at most, perhaps fewer than that. If you assume that domainers are engaged in search engine optimization, however, the number can top 10 million (I don’t know how many expired domains there are). At any given time there may be as many as 2,000,000 expired domains on the market.
And then you have to consider that many free hosting services provide Web sites within sub-directories rather than sub-domains or domains, and there could be millions of those types of sites.
So, how many sites don’t use SEO? Millions. But I cannot be more precise than that.
How Many Synonyms Per Page SEO - There is no practical limit to how many synonyms you can use in your on-page copy, although you want the copy to be easy to read. Overemphasizing your keywords is obvious and foolish, in my opinion. If you really want to cover all variations on a keyword, write more unique articles that make use of the different variations. Don’t just substitute keywords in boilerplate text.
How Many Types Of Searching Algorithm And Which One Is The Best - I think that depends on what you’re searching for. For example, some large sites implement their own search engines (Hewlett-Packard reportedly processes tens of millions of queries per month). Some sites use custom search tools that are provided by major search services. These custom search tools may be configured to work according to different priorities than the major search engines.
There are dozens of commercially available search engines and search packages, each with their own methods and resources for indexing Web documents and satisfying queries. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses. I don’t believe it’s fair to compare them all to each other in such a generic fashion.
How Many Types Of Value Does A Link Pass - The Beginner’s Guide To Backlink Theory discusses how many types of value a link passes. Generally speaking, links can pass 6 types of value: visibility, crawling, credibility, traffic, anchor text, and PageRank-like value. There may be other types of value that links pass in some search services.
How Many Words In Description SEO - I generally recommend 25-30 words for description meta tags. These are equivalent to the types of descriptions most directories accept. You can custom-tailor your meta descriptions to use the calls to action you prefer for each page. I would not recommend reusing directory descriptions for meta descriptions, however, as Google especially often filters pages from results on the basis of duplicate meta descriptions.
If you had to create a directory for all the pages on your Web site, wouldn’t it be great if you could just grab the meta descriptions? That’s how I think of meta description data. It should be written well enough to work in a directory format, but it can also be flexible enough to include appropriate calls to action and other enticements.
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published @ November 4, 2008