search engine optimization
A little straight talk
As mentioned in our overview, your web site may be informative and look great but unless the search engines know about it, few others will. So it is important to understand certain basic things about how search engines work and what can be done to assure that your site is noticed by them.
The first thing to note is that there is no simple, quick, sure-fire way to get your site listed at the top of the first page of search results. Anyone who suggests that there is should raise your suspicions. Much of this discussion will be focused on Google, currently the most popular search engine, but most of it applies generally these days.
The next thing to note is that search engines to do not exist to serve you, the owner of a listed web site. They exist to serve people searching for information. The point is to provide searchers with the most relevant and accurate information as fast as possible. When the search engine succeeds at this, the searcher keeps coming back. When they keep coming back, the search engine’s interface becomes very valuable web real estate, which permits them to sell advertising on that property and command a high price for it. Thus they stay in business.
You as the owner of a listed web page, one among millions (if not billions), are a bit of fodder, ore, the raw material of the search trade. Your site individually is a grain of sand on the beach. How will it distinguish itself enough to capture the attention of a beach comber—and be picked up and inspected carefully and may be even carried home? Once your site gets its foot in the door (to pile on metaphors), your well-crafted text, images, layout and design may have a chance to vie for the viewer’s interest, but how does your web page get this far, given the indifference of search engine technology?
There are only 10 listings on the first page of search results at this time at Google. People rarely click beyond the first few pages, so if your listing doesn’t appear there, your site will be lonely. In fact, most people most of the time don’t click past the first page of listings. So that’s where you would like to be when somebody types in the keywords that define what your site is all about.
Let’s do the math. Suppose you sell, say, electric floss and you have a hundred competitors worldwide with websites in your language and all of them spare no effort and expense at search engine optimization (we will spell out what that means shortly) and someone types “electric floss” in Google, wouldn’t that leave you with a one in ten chance of appearing on the first page of search results?
But your hope may lie in the likelihood that not all your competitors’ sites will be in English (assuming that is your language), not all will have been in business or had their web site up as long as yours, not all will have the connections and reputation you have carefully built up over the years, not all will really know their product as well as you know yours, not all will have the same level of service or the same competitive prices as you, not all will have gone through the trouble of providing their visitors with the clean, clear and useful information about their product that you have, not all will have designed their sites to be as humanly navigable and search engine friendly as yours... and this hope is not unrealistic. Nevertheless, it is a hope.
How search engines work
But, leaving aside the math, what can we, as individual site owners with limited budgets, actually do to tweak the odds in our favor? You probably have already guessed that it includes all the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph—but what exactly is “search engine optimization”? (See the reference link at the end of this article for a more comprehensive explanation, here I intend to be pragmatic and focus on what we—meaning you as site owner and design.aporia as your web developer—can do to increase visitors to your site via search engines.)
Realize that there are no actual people at Google who take the time to rank search results, at least not quite in a way that you might imagine. If this ever happens at all, it happens rarely and with interests in mind that will never include yours. It’s not that Google is trying to be virtuously impartial; it’s that it is very expensive to be partial on this scale. The technology enforces impartiality, just as it enforces inanity sometimes (try typing in “the” in a Google search field to see how many sites “use” the term.)
The page rank of your web site listing at Google is determined by a complex set of rules, sometimes called algorithms, that computers can understand. These rules are created and programmed into indexing applications, designed to analyze the text content of web sites. The rules, of course, are made by human beings, and, as such, do ultimately express a set of human values. But their routine implementation is automated on an inhumanly vast scale.
Forget the arcane, but don't just feed the bots
Some of these rules are pretty obvious and make immediate sense. Others may be arcane and some proprietary. The proprietary ones we can never be sure about except to say that they no doubt are secret in order to give a search engine a competitive edge over its rivals in the race for accuracy and comprehensiveness as well as thwart the efforts of those in the web community who would game the system to suit their own interests at the expense of the general good. The system, when it works right, seeks to serve the greatest advantage of the greatest number. (Not necessarily from some ethical imperative as from the fact that it happens that this strategy can sometimes also be the most profitable.)
But the really important rules of search engine optimization make perfect sense and are not hard to understand and are not likely to change or trip us up in the future if we should adhere to them religiously. This is because they make sense quite apart from the very existence of search engines. These include the recommendation that your site introduce itself pretty quickly and accurately to the search engines when they visit to take account of the content of your web site. Search engine robots (aka, “spiders” or “crawlers” or “bots”) are the software that visits a web site to copy its text and pass it on to other software that will index and assign weighted values to individual terms occurring in the text. These automated “visitors” look at every word (or character string) of your web page but they don’t actually “read” it as you or I would; rather, they recognize recurring strings of characters and note which ones occur most often, where in the context of the page they occur, what other strings may be associated with them, and various other factors for which recursive rules can be written.
What the ranking software does is guess that the terms you use near the top of your site have more to do with the subject of your site than those near the bottom and that those that occur most often, up to a point, also indicate the subject of your site. So your site about “electric floss” should use that phrase near the top of your page as often as would be natural if you were indeed introducing the subject to an audience who had never heard about “electric floss.” The lesson is don’t be elliptical or too wordy or too side-long in your approach to your subject.
Warning: this does not mean you should plaster your search keywords—for that’s what they are—all over the place. The search engines will quickly pick up on that and lower your rank vis-à-vis a competitor with a more judicious frequency of distribution on the same terms. Nor does this mean that you cannot really think out of the box, as it were, and really explain your subject in more creative and engaging terms than just those that narrowly and commonly define your subject in the most straightforward way: that is, that you must confine yourself to the lowest common denominator keywords (e.g. electric floss this and electric floss that, etc.). The right keyword frequency is that which introduces and explains the subject of your page most clearly and engagingly to a human being.
Engaging humans
Despite the fact that a search engine bot can analyze your page a million times faster than any human, the bot and the human have this in common: they are both pressed for time. The human because she or he has a life to live; the bot because it has a million other sites to do in the next few minutes.
But they are different in that it is possible to engage the human to linger, while the bot could care less about the richness of your vocabulary, the aptness of your metaphors, the balance of colors, the sensuousness of your images (which it can’t even see) or even the quality of your products or services...
Actually, this is not quite true. A search engine does indirectly care about those things...which leads us to another important factor affecting page rank: The human factors (usability, aesthetics, organization, etc.) matter because, to the extent they garner links to your site from other web sites belonging to people who were sufficiently impressed by something at your site, they count as a vote for your site. And that can be and does get noticed by the search engine indexing software when it comes to ranking your site. The bots will find these incoming links. Not only that, but they will note whether these other sites are themselves linked to by still other sites in order to gauge their trustworthiness and so on. A link to your site from another is not enough. It matters what kind of site this is that links to yours. The site must be related in some way to the subject matter of yours. It is even better if the text at the site discusses yours and is not just a link. It matters what other things this site links to and discusses, etc. For example, a blog devoted to the subject of electric floss may review a product sold at your site and link to it. Better yet, if lots of sites devoted to oral hygiene link to yours and are themselves established reliable sources of information within their fields. The incoming links do not have to be purchased or bartered; in fact, unsolicited link backs are the best kind if you can get them. And to get and keep them, you have to think long-term.
So your text is important not just in the simple way you might have thought. It is not just about sprinkling your keywords near the top of your page, in title tags and headers, etc. That’s important but it must not be carried to the point of negatively affecting the readability and usefulness of your text for human beings; if it does, your site will suffer for it. If you are serious about your site, your focus should be on engaging human visitors enough for them to recommend your site on theirs through the use of links. Engaging your human readers is the one long term strategy that you can depend on no matter what new tweaks the future may bring to search engine technology.
So then it does matter that your site impress your human visitors enough for them to think to create links to it. The quality of your content is king. But, to get the edge, content must be closely tied to presentation. And, of course, a big part of presentation is web design: the layout, navigability, organization, aesthetic appeal, accessibility and speed of your web site. How did Google, itself, get to the top of its game? It wasn’t just because of the quality of their service. It mattered that their mission was clear and simple, and their interface was clean, uncluttered, and fast.
—Victor Muñoz
owner, aporia web design
