A recent study showing the power-law effect on Google search ranking traffic is enough to underscore what we already know: the Zipfian distribution (aka Power-Law, Pareto Principle, or 80-20 Rule) of the information economics, nicely formulated in the book Information Rules. (Disclaimer: Hal Varian was the dean of the UC Berkeley Information School when I attended for my Masters degree.)

We at SEO Chiangmai agree with the general advice to largely ignore the Google algorithm factors for specific targeting based on the fact that Google makes more than one change per day to the search algorithm. However, as has been recently announced, some algorithm changes will make an impact on search traffic. Therefore for business, it is important to understand and to have a strategy to deal with such a dynamic system.

The Concept of Relevance for SEO

Back in my I-School days, we learned that relevance is a human, not a computer concept. That is, what is relevant is measured by humans. In particular, Information Science early days and even now in the various TREC competitions, measures relevance with use of retired Information professionals, that is: retired CIA officers. What is relevant is what experts agree upon as relevant (there is heavy use of inter-rater reliability statistics in the social sciences). Google has merely produced a computer-based system for returning relevant results based on 200+ clues of human behavior with computers, the same clues that are accessible to computers and can be used to approximate human judgement of relevance.

For SEO — from a strategic perspective — this means creating one’s own dynamical system based on relevance to perform against that of the Google juggernaut. This does not mean re-inventing PageRank, but rather designing a checklist that can be used effectively.

SEO Chiangmai Internet Marketing Factors

We at SEO Chiangmai are the leading SEO and SEM, Internet Marketing and Ecommerce consultant in Thailand and serving Mainland Southeast Asia, the Greater Mekong Subregion. Our set of factors are part and parcel of our content+social media consulting services offering which provides excellent, measurable and affordable business results. We will present a significant number of our factors in upcoming articles on SEO Chiangmai and elsewhere on the web.