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Why You Shouldn’t Care: The Truth about Search EnginesBy: Sameer Hasan, July 06, 2004
How do you get your pages to rank highly on search engines? I’ll get straight to the point - the best way to get good search engine (SE) rankings is by delivering exceptional value to your target market. All other methods are secondary and may not even work in the future. Worse, using other methods may get you penalized. So I (and others) recommend this:
“Don’t worry about what Search Engine Optimization techniques people are using, just worry about how good and how focused your products and content are, and make sure it’s worth while for your visitors to come to your site. Everything else will fall into place, because Search engine optimization as we know it is going the way of the Dodo.”
The Life and Times of Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is in decline and will soon be completely passé, finished, extinct. To understand why it will be gone, it’s important that we understand how it came to be in the first place. It all started simply because Search Engines (SE’s) are not human.
Now that I have you reeling in disbelief, allow me to explain. SE’s cannot evaluate a web page like humans evaluate a web page. They cannot rank a page based on if the page is useful, nice looking, or well written, or any other subjective way (not yet anyway). They simply can’t tell the difference. They have to rely on measurable ways of ranking pages.
Throughout history – all ten years of it - these ways have included the use of Meta tags, counting the number of keywords on the web page, and counting the number of outside websites linking to that webpage (among others). Webmasters were tripping over themselves trying to stuff their meta tags full of not-so-relevant keywords and submitting their websites to squillions of ‘free for all’ link pages. Search Engine Optimization was born.
And now it’s all changing. SE’s are getting smarter and more sophisticated and soon they will be thinking and evaluating pages almost as humans do. They don’t even care about the Meta tags anymore, which is one of the very few things we do know about SE’s since they are so secretive. Very soon, only a select few will know how SE’s figure out the value of a page. The algorithms will be so complex that we won’t even be able to guess.
We are almost at that point today. None but a few insiders know how Google’s PageRank system really works. The best we have are guesses and the experience of others, and even those are inconsistent. One thing is for sure though; SE’s are not very fond of optimization.
You see, it kinda ruins all the work they did if we try to ‘beat’ their system. Yeah, so if we could all knock it off that’d be great, thanks. Ha! More like, “knock it off, or else”.
Knock Off the SEO, or Else!
While I’ve never actually been told that by any search engine, allow me to introduce you to another quality of modern SE’s, vengefulness. SE penalties are nothing short of legendary. Not that I think it’s a bad thing, it protects me as an honest practitioner of the dark arts *cough* I mean… webmastery. An SE penalty could put me in the traffic penalty box for years, and I will have to crawl and beg my way out. I’ve no intention of looking for my groveling pants again, so I don’t think I’m going to risk it. All the SE’s really want you to do is mind your own business and let them figure out how good your page is. They want you to focus on your customer.
And you have to admit, it makes all the sense in the world. When you start delivering new and good content to your customer, your customers will like it, and they will keep coming back, telling their friends, linking to you from their websites. If your site is good, other sites will refer their customers to you by linking to you. It’s the clean, ground-up, fundamental way to make your website a traffic magnet. And that’s not all.
What’s more is that the upcoming new, sophisticated, life-like search engine algorithms will figure out that you have a good site and award you the ranking you deserve. And once you have that, all you have to do is keep up the good work and try to stay out of trouble.
Surely Some Search Engine Optimization is Ok?
Well, ok, I’ll give you that one. Search engines are not really ‘life-like’ yet, so there are some general rules to follow to make sure that today’s (imperfect) search technology actually sees what you’re doing and doesn’t misinterpret or misunderstand your content and its purpose:
1. Submit your site to Google and other search engines. (look for the ‘Add your site’ or ‘Add Url’ links). Don’t bother with the ‘submit your site to 30000000 search engines for 20 bucks!’ companies. Do it manually, you only need the one or two search engines. Submit to the ones you use yourself.
2. Make sure search engines can see and get to your pages. Use valid links, and avoid addresses like http://www.example.com/products.asp?blah=blah&product=really%20good%20new%widget. I’m sure you have seen these. Avoid if you can. (if you already have them, investigate technologies such as mod_rewrite and ISAPI_rewrite, you'll thank me later).
3. Make sure you use HTML that makes sense for structuring your content. I.e. use heading tags ( h1, h2...h6) for headings and use paragraph tags (p) for paragraphs. Search engines cannot see visual layouts, so this will help them determine the outline of the page.
4. Make sure each page of your website is focused. Talk about one topic per page. By having focused pages, it will be easier for search engines to figure out what that page is about. For shopping carts, make sure you have categories separated logically and each category page has a description of the category.
5. New is good - Always be coming up with new content that is related to your website. Content can be products, articles, forum messages, etc. Aim to develop about 300-500 words per day. Hey, it beats a commute. As for getting ideas on new content, try to figure out what your customers would like to see and give it to them. Do you sell basketball shoes? Write an article about the evolution of basketball footwear. Start a message board that discusses which shoe is best for what situation. Get some new products.
6. Avoid like the plague any technique that seems to ‘trick’ the search engines. These are a delightfully good way of getting yourself penalized or tossed out altogether.
7. Don’t do *any* of the above if you think it will hurt your customer in their search for content. And no, headings don’t hurt your customer. Sheesh.
Final Thoughts
The complexities of future search engines will make it next to impossible for us to determine what tricks work with them. We have to get back to the basics of business by focusing on delivering exceptional and unique value to our customers through new and useful content and products, and all will be well. Always ask yourself before you make a change to your website, “Is my customer benefiting from this change?” and make sure you know the answer before you do anything.
Trust me on that one.
Discuss this article in our forums
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Author: Sameer Hasan
Date: 07/06/2004
Sameer Hasan of Webrightnow.com is
dedicated to making Web design affordable and accessible to all those
who need it. Sameer has a degree in both Marketing and Management
Information Systems.
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