SEPOV is an acronym for “Search Engine Point of View”; it is generally used in the context of discussions of search engine optimization (SEO). If you really want to approach SEO with confidence, you need to learn to look at your website from the perspective of the search engine spider and consider your motivation (if you’ll allow me a little anthropomorphism).

Fortunately, search engine spiders are actually quite simple creatures.

What is my motivation?

In fact, there is one simple, central, and obvious truth about search engines from which everything else follows: 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 who try to predict what Google will do next wring their hands and spend a lot of money. The simple fact is that all search engines will do what they have always done and always will, which is to 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 search engine spider’s motivation is therefore that of its creators: to find valuable information so that other 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 on specific search terms. Think back to that statement for a moment: “…return links to pages that have the most high-quality information on specific search terms.”

There are profound implications in that simple statement that the vast majority of website designers simply miss.

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For a given web page, depth is more important than breadth. Lots of 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, you have to convince it of two things:

1. Your page has a lot of information about the search terms. That is, it is relevant to the search query.

2. Your page has good information about the search terms (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.

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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 top 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’ll want every page on the site to be highly relevant to the keywords in the title. .

In other words, in my opinion, it’s better to have multiple sites, each focusing on a narrowly defined topic, than one site that has a hit-and-run approach to many topics.

Coming soon in the next installment: Spiders are more human than you think!

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