Peter doesn’t talk down to anyone in his book, and has a results oriented approach. As mentioned above he realizes that Search Engines have in the past and still do today a ton of traffic that can be sent to your’s or your client’s domains.

But he also realizes that Search engines are not the only place for traffic. Point being that if they didn’t have the huge amounts that they do have we wouldn’t care about them.

Shoot look at the traffic you can get from YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia. In the future SEO might just eventually die and all that will be left are professionals optimizing for maximum visibility on the internet in general instead of on specific websites.

Also bloggers write blog posts and links. Links mean votes for rankings in search engines. Peter Kent’s idea are all “White Hat”, another reason why I love his book. I am looking forward to meeting him someday.

The resources he gives are good, he has a fairly extensive list of directories you can submit too. He uses fun examples in the book like “rat racing” and explains how to subit your site to these directories.

He now has 3rd edition coming out.. which should have better lists and resources. 3 editions! Shoot that’s another reason to like Peter Kent. His commitment to bringing SEO out of the black and into the white is commendable, and with each edition he just proves that it is working.

Cheers, Peter! Your an SEO Ace!

Brian,

My comment was too long to leave on your article page. I added a track-back I hope it works.

I like the article. I do believe however it is missing some key points of “how” Google is assimilating its vast data base of user data. I personally believe there are at least five key tools Google uses.

The 1st is of course the SERP. They have the most control and the most time tweaking the code to get the data as accurate as possible for their search engine result pages. Results that are more clicked on than others are in my opinion more relevant.

The second is the purchase of Urchin and giving away “FREE” website analytics. I wonder just how much of the web Google is really tracking. I mean With website analytics we invite them to get more data then any other search engine. I think this is the ultimate user driven data source Google has at its finger tips.

The third is the Google Checkout system. The data is mainly for weighting is mainly for commercial keywords. Think about it with website analytics combined with actual revenue of a specific keyword they can actually judge how well your site converts, how much money you made from that customer, what keyword that customer used from ANY search engine, and thus could manipulate keyword ranks in this manner. A higher converting website with more traffic and more sales, that grosses more revenue than another is more relevant in my book. What if they started to base certain keyword PPC bidding prices based on this data. They know how much money your company grossed remember.

However, this brings up a thousand questions. What happens to startup companies, will they even be able to compete? Will the price of entering a market skyrocket? Bid prices really being “bids”? Shoot they even have an algorithm that gives a “quality score” on that. And many many other questions!

The fourth is the data gathered from sites like YouTube which you already mentioned. Don’t forget that Google is a advertising system company, thats where they make their money. They are a glorified publisher of user generated content. Yes the entire web is “Internet User” generated. They used to just publish our (Internet User) content, and label them as “search results” now they finally have websites that are not a search engines and have “real content”.

They also do advertising on TV and radio now. My point is simply they are a business. Many people tend to forget that they exist to make money. They are not a government entity nor are they a “non-profit” organization. I completely agree with you when you say they are trying to defend their algorithm and keep their user base.

The fifth all is all the rest of the data we actually just give to them for free because of the neat services they give us in return. These are the tools they give away for free just to keep us coming back and using their search engine. Or at least we thought thats all they were giving the tools away for free for. But come to find out in their TOS they can use my email for their business purposes. They can use my pictures, my blogger blog, my spreadsheets, text documents, notebooks, and etc. for enhancing their advertising system.

All of this Brian is where the user data is. I think explaining this would greatly enhance your personal position concerning the Google Algorithm(s) and its (their) new and future state.

Please note however, I do not believe all these systems are fully integrated. I am glad they are taking their time to make changes, if they do it right they will conquer the search engine space for another 20 years. Microsoft and Yahoo are so far behind in collecting data. Its ridiculous. Unless maybe Microsoft is collecting data via their IE browser and their Operating Systems. Wow, shoot that brings up so many many more questions.

If Microsoft did do that they would be able to compete with Google. That is their one and only current advantage over Google for user data in the search engine advertising world. Microsoft is not a advertising company. Which is one of the reasons why I love them. They actually produce their own products and services that people BUY! Google sells ads! in my opinion, thats their only product / service they actually sell. Where Microsoft actually produces products and hires advertising firms. It will be a long uphill battle for Microsoft. Its just not what they do best.

However, this is only one of the reasons why it is broken. The actual official document by Google is a lame blog post!  I mean this post has huge paragraphs making it hard to skim for simple information that answers the simple questions such as where is this knol? Can I use it?

It just so happens that wikipedia was the third result giving me faster more relevant information than Google’s own pages did.In 30 seconds scanning the wiki page I was able to find out why I couldn’t get to the actual knol web site. Which was the reason I was searching for knol in the 1st place.  According to wikipedia, knol is a closed or invitation only beta test. Knowing this ended my search. Thanks wikpedia for telling me all about the knol encyclopedia.

On a side note the fourth result is really just an image but notice that it is an actual html page rather than a image result. Which is a underused tactic to rank images as pages. Shoot even the big dawg Google uses it.