Why do so many continue to act surprised when Google alters the page rankings? Mark Simon has a perspective that I strongly share... Why does anyone allow their business to depend on the charity of Google's fickle page ranking? He chides both SEO experts and the clients that follow them unquestioningly.
I am not anti-SEO. I just think too much focus is placed on the engines and not enough on good communication. If you know SEO, the rest of this is going to bore you, unless you just feel like slamming my perspective ( I won't mind). For the rest, this is a primer with opinion.
Search engines want the consumers / users to have good experience post click. That is what will keep users coming back to the engine to search other topics. The point is, they want your site to serve the needs of the users. So, you need to focus on the user's needs. This sounds basic, but is too often forgotten.
So to that end, content, well structured and well organized, is paramount. Each page should be focused on a particular area of your business. If you sell bicycles and parts, putting the bikes and parts listed and described on one page dilutes the content. It makes it hard for users to zero in on the information they want. If someone is looking for bike tires, and it is buried somewhere among bikes, brakes, cranks and helmets, how will they find it. As it turns out, search engines aren't any better at figuring it out. In fact they are worse. They figure out what a page is about through the concentration of like clues and their occurrence relative to all other information. This is known as density... usually discussed as keyword density.
The best way to help search engines match your pages with searches is to concentrate on narrow topics that are easily associated with likely keyword searches. Dedicating a page to tires (or even road tires and off-road tires), with appropriate content makes it easier for an engines to match it up to a search for, say... mountain bike tires. A dedicated page might appear 60% about these tires, where a 'junk' page with everything might appear to be less than 10% about it (just as an example). If you had to decide which page was more focused on tires, which one would you pick?
The structure of the content is important too. Well thought out menu and page hierarchy allows the users to navigate to the content easily. It also happens to be a way for the engines to see the connection between the pages of our site and understand the nature of the content. Again, what is good for the user is also good for the engines.
We hear a lot about the tags or coding. These are important, though the importance of some tags seems to ebb and flow. As good form, engines aside, proper code for alt tags, title tags, names, meta, etc should be followed. Some of the tags aid in usability, others make it easier to manage development. There are SEO folks who will tell you it matters a great deal and others will say, not so much. My view is simple. Don't be lazy, follow good form and you'll be ready should Google or Yahoo! switch things up again. Some of these tags are important now, others may become important(again).
Links. Links. Links... The latest change from Google (it is rumored) is intended to defeat some of the paid linking schemes that are used. I don't know that this is so. However, I am not a fan of paid links. If we spend as much time focusing on the needs of the users, developing good content, working on the site / experience and developing good reciprocal linking partnerships that add value to the user experience, we may convert more of the users we get while attracting more links naturally. Oh, and not lose sleep worrying that Google might find us out.
Press releases are important. But, if they serve no other purpose than to try to create links to your site, fire your PR person and find a better use of your money. As with the rest of the SEO tactics, do they serve a broader need and add value to the business? If so, go full steam ahead and, by the way, add a link to your site (preferably to a section related to the release).
You know there is more... there are whole books dedicated to SEO. But, the bottom line in any good SEO program is to focus first and foremost on the user. Only then should you put efforts toward improving your Google page ranking. And, for goodness sake, don't build a business model around SEO.
