Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine

Usually it is called "search engine optimization" or SEO

Hard core techies look down on it because search engines were evolved to find information. The Internet has become the repository for all human knowledge and finding specific facts is a daunting task. A good search engine is absolutely essential - Google is a good search engine. So if the process gets corrupted it ruins the egalitarian effect of the Internet to make information a level playing field. Imagine if someone could manipulate the Library of Congress indexing system or the Dewey Decimal System so that when you do a search in the library's catalog for recipes all the results are books about company X's new cooker. The libray's card catalog would become almost useless. That is the effect on the Internet of trying to use Google as a marketing arm of a company. It dilutes the usefulness of the results.

So Google is constantly changing and adding to their code to catch such efforts and continue to give the best results/returns possible; that is: "relevant returns." The other search engines do not spend as much money on R&D (not by a long shot) and thus are always playing catch-up. Another company bought three or four other search engines and combined their code to try to become better. Unfortunately that does not work since the "intelligent" functionality that Google has produced existed nowhere in the other engines' code. The same search on Google and the other company will produce recipes on Google and company X's cookers on the other one.

So, what can be done without breaking the Information Age? Make a relevant page. Produce excellent content. Build its structure so software robots (bots) can easily index it.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? Most pages fail because the author is trying to manipulate the reader into contributing to the bottom line - profit. So they count the number of times a hot-word or key phrase appears in the page. Some even worry about the exact placement of those words throughout the page. Instead, WME suggest authors put themselves in the shoes of their uninformed guest and tell all the story about not only their product but also all products in the category. Tell all the good and the bad and conclude with "why this one is the best value." Duh! "No brain'r." That is what all of us want when we are shopping so why not give that when you are the expert? And, as a side benefit (besides winning the trust of your customer), Google will like your page because it references everything that everyone else does, only it does it in one place, or one section of your site.

That is the most important - content. Secondly is structure. A good XML structure such as XHTML helps the bots, and using tags correctly also helps. Put paragraphs in tags and include headers as much as is reasonable. DO NOT use tables to position content on the page; use them only to display tabular data. Tables just make it harder for the bots. Put everything in HTML/XHTML and not PDF files or Word documents. Bots can read and index XHTML far better than PDFs. And finally, do not clutter the content with styling code. Instead, put classes on the tags and put the styling code in cascading style sheets, CSS.

PS: WME has no affiliation with Google; we just admire their twin business strategies, "Do no harm" and "research, research, research."