- Original Poster
- #1
Wow!! big claim! Seo dead?
Well not really. I'm specifically talking about 'traditional' SEO, Ie keyword density, obsessive worrying about site navigation 'from googles pov' and trying to weight h tags with most content relevant phrases. All that sort of thing. Which is all still good practice...
...But I think it's now good practice not so much for the search engine, but because it makes the site better for the human visitor as well as the robot, and that, I believe does more for SEO than anything else.
So to make a very bold statement, I get the impression that these days if a site appeals to human visitors (which google can detect by their behaviour) that will send the site up the SERPs faster than just about any 'inside knowledge trickery'. It's not just a theory based on my own observations either, it would actually make the most sense.
It stands to reason that Google (and prominent others but for the sake of a shorter post I'll just refer to Google from now on) would prefer to suggest content based on actual user appreciation over and above any single other algorithm it could run when considering placement. google knows which sites get clicked the most for a given search query, and a lot of the time (especially for any site which has made any sort of SEO effort) it is highly likely to also know how long that user stayed on the site and how they interacted with it.
So here are two examples:
1) A perfect SEO site that any expert would look at, and conclude their services were of no further use (this has probably never actually happened of course..) but in theory, a site could effectively be fully seo'd. Done, perfect, finished. And on this site the content is all relevant, unique and useful. You would be disappointed if Google didn't rank it pretty highly.
2) An SEO nightmare of a site. Everything is wrong. There are hardly any obvious keywords that give any consideration to what people might search for in the real world, the markup is useless and the navigation so bad that the last robot that entered the site got lost and died 3 weeks later whilst trying to escape the vortex of messy system generated url re-directs. HOWEVER, from a human point of view, this site is actually more useful than the one in the first example. Perhaps it contains some very unique information, or probably was just written by a passionate person that is very skilled at presenting their wisdom to a human audience.
So what does Google do? It makes sense that if both sites were submitted at the same time, the first would appear higher up than the second. Much higher up, google wouldn't know what to do with the second site, we can assume it would be bunged away on page 6 of the serps.
But what happens after 6 months? What if Google notices that people that start with the same sort of search term end up spending 3 times as long on the second site as the first? Do we really believe that Google will blindly stick to some basic quality criteria even when it has access to data that proves, for reasons logical or not, that the best resource it could be showing is buried away on page 6? To believe that, we would have to believe to that Google is so obsessed with developing the perfect site appraisal algorithms that it's prepared to ignore 'plain as day' data, that we know it has in huge quantities, to actually show the site that it's users will statistically appreciate the most.
This all assumes that Google's primary mission is to be the best search engine for human beings. Irrespective of how that is achieved. And I think that's a sensible assumption.
So in conclusion. It may be that an SEO expert could quite rightly identify all sorts of things that could be improved. But it may also be the case that the same time spent improving the usefulness of your site to human beings, will yield greater returns than worrying about SEO at all. Besides, in making a site as good as it can be for humans, you will by default start to improve *some* areas concerned with traditional SEO anyway.
Question to challenge the theory:
If you search for any used car, Auto Trader is up there at or close to the top (possibly behind dealer network of course). Is their SEO good? Who knows, anyone who looks I guess but I don't think it matters. If their SEO was appalling would they still rank as well? I think yes. Auto Trader has the biggest collection of used cars, and is laid out in the easiest to navigate manner. People spend hours on that site. I just can't believe Google would give a two hoots how it read the site personally, so long as everyone else clearly finds it more useful than any other site in the same category.
Discuss - let the hurling of e-rocks commence.
Well not really. I'm specifically talking about 'traditional' SEO, Ie keyword density, obsessive worrying about site navigation 'from googles pov' and trying to weight h tags with most content relevant phrases. All that sort of thing. Which is all still good practice...
...But I think it's now good practice not so much for the search engine, but because it makes the site better for the human visitor as well as the robot, and that, I believe does more for SEO than anything else.
So to make a very bold statement, I get the impression that these days if a site appeals to human visitors (which google can detect by their behaviour) that will send the site up the SERPs faster than just about any 'inside knowledge trickery'. It's not just a theory based on my own observations either, it would actually make the most sense.
It stands to reason that Google (and prominent others but for the sake of a shorter post I'll just refer to Google from now on) would prefer to suggest content based on actual user appreciation over and above any single other algorithm it could run when considering placement. google knows which sites get clicked the most for a given search query, and a lot of the time (especially for any site which has made any sort of SEO effort) it is highly likely to also know how long that user stayed on the site and how they interacted with it.
So here are two examples:
1) A perfect SEO site that any expert would look at, and conclude their services were of no further use (this has probably never actually happened of course..) but in theory, a site could effectively be fully seo'd. Done, perfect, finished. And on this site the content is all relevant, unique and useful. You would be disappointed if Google didn't rank it pretty highly.
2) An SEO nightmare of a site. Everything is wrong. There are hardly any obvious keywords that give any consideration to what people might search for in the real world, the markup is useless and the navigation so bad that the last robot that entered the site got lost and died 3 weeks later whilst trying to escape the vortex of messy system generated url re-directs. HOWEVER, from a human point of view, this site is actually more useful than the one in the first example. Perhaps it contains some very unique information, or probably was just written by a passionate person that is very skilled at presenting their wisdom to a human audience.
So what does Google do? It makes sense that if both sites were submitted at the same time, the first would appear higher up than the second. Much higher up, google wouldn't know what to do with the second site, we can assume it would be bunged away on page 6 of the serps.
But what happens after 6 months? What if Google notices that people that start with the same sort of search term end up spending 3 times as long on the second site as the first? Do we really believe that Google will blindly stick to some basic quality criteria even when it has access to data that proves, for reasons logical or not, that the best resource it could be showing is buried away on page 6? To believe that, we would have to believe to that Google is so obsessed with developing the perfect site appraisal algorithms that it's prepared to ignore 'plain as day' data, that we know it has in huge quantities, to actually show the site that it's users will statistically appreciate the most.
This all assumes that Google's primary mission is to be the best search engine for human beings. Irrespective of how that is achieved. And I think that's a sensible assumption.
So in conclusion. It may be that an SEO expert could quite rightly identify all sorts of things that could be improved. But it may also be the case that the same time spent improving the usefulness of your site to human beings, will yield greater returns than worrying about SEO at all. Besides, in making a site as good as it can be for humans, you will by default start to improve *some* areas concerned with traditional SEO anyway.
Question to challenge the theory:
If you search for any used car, Auto Trader is up there at or close to the top (possibly behind dealer network of course). Is their SEO good? Who knows, anyone who looks I guess but I don't think it matters. If their SEO was appalling would they still rank as well? I think yes. Auto Trader has the biggest collection of used cars, and is laid out in the easiest to navigate manner. People spend hours on that site. I just can't believe Google would give a two hoots how it read the site personally, so long as everyone else clearly finds it more useful than any other site in the same category.
Discuss - let the hurling of e-rocks commence.
