With engagement metrics, the search engine look for the short click or when and if you hit the back button and leave the web page.

Or they follow the long click that takes the user through different layers of the web site.

Machine learning means the search engines made their algorithm mimic the patterns of the human evaluators in assessing content quality and relevance.

That is what is behind the Google Panda and Penquin updates that caused a stir in early and mid 2012.

Linking patterns refers to your link structure, the quality of your inbound links, the destination of your outbound links, and your internal linking.

If you are keeping good company with no spammy sites and your internal content is high quality, you will do very well.

The last point made is about understanding search intent and making sure your content responds well to whatever that intent is.

There are three types of searches according to the guide:

• Transactional Searches    
• Navigational Searches  
• Informational Searches    

Transactional searches look for an actionable outcome from credit card transactions to form submission and restaurant reservations.

Navigational searches are intended to go directly to a specific webiste. You know your end destination and type it into the address bar>

Informational searches do not involve any transaction or navigational destination but just a search for some form of information.

They represent a huge volume of the searching that goes on.

So there you have it. The basics behind Chapter 6 of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide.

For those who want a transcript, just read on.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line, welcome. This is going

to be the continuation of the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Chapter 6. In

this chapter what they talk about are three really important concepts:

usability, user experience and content. To me, when I first read this the

first time through, a couple years ago, this was very abstract for me, but

let’s take a look and see what it means.

 

Usability has to do with the ease of use, whether a site is easy to

navigate and whether your site is easy to understand. Do you provide direct

actionable information relevant to the query? So somebody typed in

something, they’re looking for information, whatever their intent was, they

land on your page, and does the information satisfy that intent?

 

Professionally designed, accessible to modern browsers. They want to make

sure that your site looks good and can be loaded into Safari, Firefox,

Chrome, Internet Explorer, any number of browsers that exist out there,

without any problems. Do you deliver high quality legitimate credible

content? In other words, are you creating that content yourself? Are you

scraping it? Where is the information that you’re getting coming from?

That’s very important.

 

How does it measure usability and the user experience? That’s what this

next section comes up with. There are a limited number of variables that

search engines take into account directly. That’s like keywords, links,

site structure. Through the linking patterns, user engagement metrics and

machine learning, the engines make a considerable number of intuitions

about a given site. Usability and user experience are second order

influences on a search engine, how they measure your success. They provide

an indirect but measurable benefit to a site’s popularity, which engines

can then interpret as a higher quality signal. No one likes to link to a

crummy site.

 

In essence, what this means is good sites will have a certain look and

feel, bad sites will have a lousy look and feel. Then through your link

structure, the search engines can judge you by the company you keep. So if

you’re getting links from high authority sites and trusted sites, and

you’re linking back to decent sites, that’s good. If your links are coming

from spammy sites, and you’re linking to spammy sites, that’s bad. There’s

a whole subject matter among SEOs about the tactic of your opposition

sending you bad links so that they can get you into trouble, and that’s a

subject for another video.

 

Signals of quality content. How do they measure the quality of your

content, and what signals do search engines look for? They look for a click

sequence. When you land on a site, or someone lands on your site, how long

does it take them to click that back button? Or better yet, do they stay on

your site and start linking into your site? The short click isn’t good,

that is, when they come in and click right back out. The long click, if

they spend some time on your site, is very good, and there’s a way for them

to measure that. Engagement metrics is one.

 

Machine learning. This has to do with whether or not the content on your

site is high quality or low quality. What Google did was they used human

evaluators to actually look at thousands of sites, and the pattern of that

human evaluator behavior was then written into an algorithm. That algorithm

went out and did a certain update that’s better known as the Panda update,

and many sites, especially content forms, got penalized, and other sites

that were judged to have very good content benefited. The only problem with

that is that human evaluators are human. They make mistakes, which means

this algorithm, this Panda business, worked pretty well, but there was a

lot of collateral damage. If you have a website that’s been legitimately

put together, like one of mine, and it disappears, I don’t know that the

intent here has been well served for those sites that suffered collateral

damage. Of course, Google tells you that it succeeded.

 

There has been another update called the Penguin update that has to do with

linking. The next section, the linking patterns, is an interesting one.

Here what it means is, it looks at the links coming into your site and the

links going out of your site, and what it wants to see is links coming in

from other relevant sites, especially if they are authoritative and trusted

sites, and then links going out to other authoritative sites and trusted

sites coming from your site. In other words, it’s judging you by the

company you keep. You want to make sure that your linking pattern is

natural and not induced by all sorts of artificial means, which these

search engines can now read very easily.

 

The third part of it is, how can it measure good content? I just told you a

little while ago, content can be generated by you, which really it should

be. If your content reflects your own persona and your own style and you’re

writing it, you have nothing to worry about. If your content comes from

other websites, you better attribute it that way. Some sites syndicate and

do content curation, that sort of thing. As long as the attributions are

there, you’re fine, but the fact that that information’s been indexed

elsewhere will diminish its importance on your site.

 

It also then explains search intent flavors. We already discussed this in

another chapter. There are different ways that people search. Transactional

searches involve some form of action, not only a commercial transaction,

but signing up for a newsletter, filling out a login form, any kind of call

to action that’s satisfied is a transactional search.

 

Navigational searches are when you are specifically looking for a piece of

real estate online and you type in that URL directly. I may be looking for

chocolate.com, I just type it in. I may be looking for another website of a

friend, I just type in the URL directly. That’s a navigational search.

 

Informational searches are exactly what you would think. People are looking

for information, could be local weather, getting a map, getting directions,

finding out about a particular subject matter, looking into health

information, all sorts of motivations for informational searches.

 

The extent to which you satisfy the intent behind informational searches,

navigational searches, transactional searches, by creating a website that

is easy to use, gives a great user experience, and has content in it that

is relevant, important, and generated, if you’re lucky, by you, then you’re

in good shape. That’s basically what this chapter is about.

 

There are samples of websites that I can demonstrate here, where you have

in this case, Eric Nagel’s site. The navigation up here will tell you a lot

about what this site’s about, so will the content that you’re going to find

here. People who come to this site are liable to be in affiliate marketing,

and they may have all sorts of different questions about PHP, different

ways that he consults, if they’re interested in him, you can find out all

about him, et cetera. Dale on the other hand, has a website that is very

informational, give you a lot of information about Internet marketing in

general. This one is about podcasting. He reviews a lot of books. He’s been

very successful online, especially with the purchase and sales of websites.

 

This is another website. This one is about, you can just take a look at it,

it’s about design. It’s pretty clear here what this site’s about if you

just look at just the graphics and the quality of the colors and look at

the headline of the article. Designers are becoming to this website. Here’s

one, another website. If you look at the navigation again, you’re going to

see SEO consulting, and that’s what this site is all about. Among many

other things, but the primary competence of the owner of this site, who’s a

well known expert on search engine optimization, right here, it’s a

fantastic site.

 

That’s what they’re talking about. I just showed you four sites that have

great page rank, highly ranked, and they’re executing all of these concepts

very well. That’s it. I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude

Pelanne of Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, I will talk to

you soon.