SEO and all that

[Agri-Hire]

SEO experts reckon that they can optimise a page for the search engines, and that there are 100s of things that they have to analyze in order to do this.

I would imagine that they have some software that checks all these variables and then they adjust the page based on the results of that scan.

Eventually they will make a page that is as perfect as it can be for search engines like Google.

These people know what they are doing right?



OK, so then there's Google, whose sole aim is to provide surfers with the pages they want to find. Any attempt to spam the system and gain an unfair ranking is frowned upon, any attempt to cheat is frowned upon, link farms are now frowned upon, buying 1000s of text links is now frowned upon, etc, etc, etc. If they catch you trying to manipulate their rankings they will ban your site.



So now let's go back to the SEO guy making his optimised pages. If his software can instantly detect where a page is going wrong, then it must be easy for Google to have software to show the same.

The point being this: Any page that has 100 variables, which are all falling within exact parameters, for SEO is not natural. The page has clearly been built to manipulate the rankings, those variables would not be correct just by pure chance would they? Google can see that it is not an organic site, see that it is build to cheat the system and drop it's ranking below someone like me who just wants to build a site because I think people mind find it interesting.

As far as I can make out, we should forget about SEO and concentrate on content, content and more content.

:wink:

Feel free to shoot me down in flames! 8)

 

[Enigma121]

Hi,

As you state SEO is pretty much a fixed set of rules, which if applied will tend to help a site to rank better. It's not as simple as running a single piece of software, because the rules aren't that hard and fast - a lot of it's heuristic and subjective based on what is "relevant" to your site and site content.

It's very difficult to write simple software which does this (as no doubt the folks at Google have found over the years). So in short there is still a bit of an art to it.

You have touched in the "new" SEO which is writing / optimising / syndicating site content to make the site rank better. With the new Jagger Google update this has become FAR more important than it was previously.

This in itself is a skill which not everyone has, so again can be bought in from a 3rd party SEO / content consultant. Thanks for the tip, it provides new additional content which we need to leverage and include in our site as an SEO.

 

[Top Hat]

As far as I can make out, we should forget about SEO and concentrate on content, content and more content.

Spot on, obviously you need to know how SE work, do your titles and stuff. But the most important thing is to create good content aimed at users.

 

[Richard Conyard]

Still with the bee in my bonnet, content, semantic content and structure!