No shortcut to popularity (SEO Part I)

by Loren Johnson on Monday, May 28, 2007

Want to trick your way into the first 5 Google results for a search on “LA’s best realtor”? Good luck.

Google and the other prominent Internet search tools (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) are constantly improved to guarantee truly relevant search results to their users. There are geniuses at Google, we’ve all heard that. Well you can bet that still most of them work on the search team. Way back in the glory day of the early internet you’d just copy 2 or 300 relevant phrases into a hidden area of your web page and voila! you’d achieved Google Search fame. No way these days. These geniuses at Google devote their every working hour to keeping your excellent, deep and widely used website right there at the top and the other guy’s pyramid marketing late night TV commercial site at the bottom (that is unless you were searching for “revolutionary electric slippers”).

Thanks to all this constant hard work it’s become a much safer bet spending all your time thinking-up a website that’s meaningful to your target audience and none on the once advantageous SEO “tricks”.

This is good news. Better search results mean a better, more valuable, experience for everyone, and as a web designer I’m more freed-up to help my clients make relevant websites.

Though probably much more sophisticated an algorithm than the mysterious computation of my credit score, a search engine determines relevance of a site to a search by at least these key factors (though not necessarily in this order):

1. The total amount of content relating to the keyword in the entire site and (context), 2. Frequently a site gets “mentioned” or linked-to from other sites (popularity) 3. The age of the site (history)

Search Engine Optimization, abbreviated SEO, is the art and science of monitoring and managing a website in such a way as to make sure it appears as high as possible in search engine results. This fledgling industry used to be based largely on a myriad of the aforementioned “tricks” (which no longer work) and is still often associated with services making wild claims and guarantees all for $x.99 price tags (act now!) to accompany them. It seemed the credit repair agencies had found a new “opportunity”.

If you ask me the 1/3 of these firms that still try and ride the hype of SEO magic might be better off moving on to electric slippers. However, from what I’ve seen the other 2/3 seem to have kept up with the industry to varying degrees which puts them in an increasingly precarious place.

The better the search engines get at guessing the most relevant content for your search terms, the more the good SEO companies get into the real content business. Not good news for SEO folk as content is hard work, much more involved than exploiting high-value tricks for achieving search ranking. Its design, branding, organizing, developing, even community building, it’s the whole wide world web.

Sure, we want to help your site become popular and high ranked. We want people to use your site and to love it and to love you for it.

At the Fn Group we focus first on identifying your audience and then on creating the most relevant and engaging site for this group of folks. period. This is the product of mission-driven web design. If you know who you’re site is made for and that the content therein is verifiably relevant to this group, then 95% of the SEO battle has been won.

What you’re left with is the online world outside your site. Participation in online discussion via forums, blogs, articles submissions, etc., at every chance linking back to your site. Essentially, shameless promotion. This may be the only SEO “trick” still worth writing about and if you’ve been with me this long perhaps you’ll come back in a few weeks for Part II: No Website is and Island.

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