EggRage.co.uk

* This is part 2 of the ‘Real SEO’ series, you can read part 1 ‘Real SEO: Is NOT Spam’ here.

You may be confused by this one, possibly even a little surprised and angry that the world has been lying to you for so long telling you that you need to ‘optimise for search engines’ when you don’t need to at all. The underlying aspect of search engines that we always forget is that, not only are they programmed to act like users, but they were also created, and are controlled, by users.

The similarities between elements that are important to search engines and elements that are important to users, are strikingly obvious.

Let’s take a look

• Titles and Meta Content
  • Search engines: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and rank it accordingly.
  • Users: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and decide whether or not to use it.
• Header Tags
  • Search engines: Use them to assess what the main bodies of text are about, and rank the page accordingly.
  • Users: Use them to quickly see what the main bodies of text are about.
• Anchor Text
  • Search engines: Use is to understand what the page that is being linked to is about, and rank that page according to its relevance to the anchor text, and the quality of the inbound links.
  • Users: Use it to understand what the page that is being linked to is about.
• Alt Attributes
  • Search engines: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing.
  • Users: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing. Particularly disabled users, and people who browse with images turned off.
• Page Copy
  • Search engines: Use this to establish which search queries this content is relevant to.
  • Users: Use this to establish if the content is relevant to what they are looking for.
• Strong Tags
  • Search engines: Use this to pick out important key phrases within the copy.
  • Users: Use this to scan the copy and pick out the most important words.

  I could go on all afternoon, but I won’t because I’m sure you get the general idea by now.

  So many people go crazy when trying to ‘SEO’ their sites, they think ‘right, here are some techniques to use, lets apply them to absolutely everything’. Which unsurprisingly, doesn’t work.

  Real SEO is User Optimisation because…

  Think about the techniques you’re using to rank higher, and now ask yourself this: Would a user appreciate it? If the answer is yes, then the chances are that a search engine will too.

  Here are a couple of examples

  You add 35 key phrases to your page copy, and but them all in strong tags.

  • Users say: I can’t read it, it looks terrible.
  • Search engines say: Its spam

  You use clear anchor text throughout your site that is relevant to the page which is being linked to.

  • Users say: This is really easy to navigate, I like it.
  • Search engines say: The anchor text is relevant to the page content.

  Again, I could go on, but I won’t. The jist of it is that if you’re pissing off your users with your ‘optimisation’ attempts, then you’re probably annoying the hell out of search engines too.

  Write your site, your code, and your content for your users. It doesn’t MATTER how many people find you in Google if your content is worthless to the visitors. Create your code and your content for users and you’ll see a nice correlation to your rankings too.

  SEO does not mean tricking search engines for ranks.

  Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank.

  SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank.

  More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow…

No related posts.