Remember that search engine algorithms interpret information relative to a larger set of information.

In other words, information about you and your site -- i.e. how many pages your site has, what your site is thematically about, what links it attracts, etc. -- is evaluated in the context of a larger set of information (i.e. what your entire niche is like).

In the case of a search query, information search engines have about the user, the query, and the search engine's index of sites are all used to interpret the query and give what is most closely matches the searcher's desires.

Because of this, you need to consider how much information search engines have about the topics (or more specifically, keywords) your site is targeting. The less information there is, the more you need to invest in content to rank. The more information there is, the more you need to invest in attention to rank.

Investing in attention means linking out.

As the web grows and becomes more and more saturated, value will go to attention allocators, and such sites will rank well.

As such, investing in portals is likely to be beneficial for SEO in web 2.0, the universe of the attention economy.

In the next post, we'll take a look at how SEO will change as communities take over the web.

Other Posts in This Series

Attention vs. Content: What to Invest in?
SEO 2.0: Community Building
SEO 2.0: Trust & Duplicate Content
Resources for Learning More About SEO