subject: Google Optimisation: Google search engine optimisation and their 80/20 rule [print this page] Search engine optimisation or optimization (with a z' or is that zee' if your from across the pond') techniques are constantly evolving. This evolution is in response to the evolution of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google in particular has come to be seen as the most sophisticated and advanced search engine as it is armed with an array of anti-spam technology.
Google's increasing use of anti-spam features has meant that optimising websites for Google has become much harder and it's now not just a case of opening your websites source files in notepad, adding some keywords into your various HTML tags, uploading your files and waiting for the results. In fact in my opinion and I'm sure others will agree with me, this type of optimisation, commonly referred to as onpage optimisation will only ever be 20% effective at achieving rankings for any keywords which are even mildly competitive. Those of us who aced maths in school will know this leaves us with 80% unaccounted for.
This 80% corresponds to offpage optimization. Offpage optimization is all to do with the amount of links pointing to your site and its pages, the actual linking text (anchor text) of these links and the quality of the pages which the links are on. Offpage optimisation is now for sure the overwhelmingly dominating factor which decides where a site will rank in Google. That then is what I mean by the 80/20 rule, I'm not talking about the pareto rule which means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are trivial, I'm not sure that applies to SEO.
What is the logic behind this then, why does Google give so much weight' (80%) to offpage optimization efforts and so little (20%) to onpage optimisation. Well simply put it is all about the quality of their results. Whereas onpage optimisation is completely controlled by the webmaster and can thus be abused by an unscrupulous one, offpage optimisation is something that is not controlled by anyone as such by rather by other webmasters, websites and indeed the Internet in general. This means that it is much harder to conduct any underhanded or spammy offpage optimisation methods in the hope of gaining an unfair advantage for a website in the Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), this does not mean it is impossible though.
Google Optimisation: Google search engine optimisation and their 80/20 rule
