Avoiding search engine optimization madness

Posted on January 18th, 2009 in Getting Found.

Optimize for the searcher, not the search engine. Focus on your customers, not on the technology.

It is incredibly important to get found when your customers search. However, it is even more important for your customers to find what they are looking for. And it is equally important that when they find what they’re looking for that the content be accurate, up-to-date and easy to understand.

When your customers are searching for what they want, you should seek to save as much of their time as possible. They should have to click and read only as much as they need to.

This is not to say that all your content should be short. You need as much content as your typical customer needs. If customers really need 10 detailed pictures of the product before they feel comfortable to purchase, give them that. If they want lots of technical detail, give them that. But let the customer decide how much is enough.

The above sounds like a no-brainer, but focusing on the search engine instead of the searcher can lead to websites that work for the search engine but not for your customer. Search engine-focused strategies may help bring customers to your website, but then the poor experience customers get will quickly make them leave. Here are some of the things search engines love but searchers (your customers) may hate:

Lots of pages
The more pages you have the more of a chance you have of being found by search engines. But what if these pages contain out-of-date, inaccurate content? If your customers find poor quality content as a result of clicking on a search result they will lose trust in you.

Let’s say you add lots and lots of minor content to bulk out your site. One consequence is that the important pages become harder to find. I have worked with organizations who noticed a dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction ratings when they removed minor pages from the search engine index.

Lots of content on a particular page
Search engines love actual text on a page, and generally that can be a good thing. But don’t put text on the page just for the sake of the search engine. Only put text on the page if it helps your customers complete the tasks they came to your website to complete.

Think of Google. Let’s say Google was a new company started by two students. It wants to get found. If it follows the advice given of some search engine optimization experts then it will fill its homepage with text, repeatedly using words like “search engine” and placing links to top searches such as “Britney Spears.”

But Google never did that, did they? They focused on being useful. They focused on helping customers find the right stuff as quickly as possible. The Google homepage is not optimized for a search engine. It is optimized for people who search.

The best optimization strategy of all is: Do something useful.

 

5 responses

  1. Bill Treloar says:

    Added on January 18th, 2009 at 6:14 pm

    Very nice — great advice. It does no good for SEO to drive visitors to a site only to have the website itself drive them away.

  2. Glenn Murray says:

    Added on January 18th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

    Nice post. I agree with the principle, but I’d question some of your points about SEO.

    1) Although many SEOs do advocate ridiculous amounts of copy on each page, the search engines don’t require it. It’s just one of the signals they look at (the logic is that if a page has a lot of words, there’s a chance that it might be useful). However, search engines know that people can spam with lots of useless content. Other signals help them determine if the page should rank higly, the most important being the site’s authority and the number of links pointing to the site. (An interesting proof: search for “click here”. You’ll find Adobe ranks no.1 for this query, but it’s not optimized for “click here”. That’s because millions of people around the world offer PDF downloads, and at the point of download, they tell their readers that they’ll need Acrobat Reader to view the PDF. Most of the time it looks something like this: “To install Acrobat Reader, click here.” And “click here” is usually a link.)

    2) I’m not sure the Google / “search engine” example is a good one. I wonder how much of Google’s success resulted from their own search engine ranking? Nonetheless, your point is valid. A better example would be apple.com, which ranks no.7 worldwide for “computer”, and doesn’t use “computer” at all on its home page.

    3) Search engines do like to see a lot of pages. The logic is similar to the logic of a lot of words. But you’re right, visitors don’t like to see outdated info, nor is it helpful for your old pages to clutter the search results. But instead of removing old pages, why not focus on a better internal link architecture. Here’s why. Each internal link is a vote for the destination page. You’re telling the search engines you think that page is important. So if you have important pages and you want them to be prominent in the search engines, link to them often from other pages (using keyword rich links). This will not only help those pages rank higher, it will also make it less likely that your older, outdated pages will rank high.

    I’ve covered all this stuff in great detail in my SEO ebook. If you go to my site, you’ll find it.

    Cheers.
    Glenn Murray
    (Twitter: @divinewrite)

  3. Mark Vozzo says:

    Added on January 18th, 2009 at 11:10 pm

    Hi Gerry, This is a great article. I’ve been doing SEO for many years and witnessed both White Hat and Black Hat techniques in play. Company Webmasters & Digital Marketers can spend loads of time, effort & $$$ customizing their sites for the engines.

    This post really resonates with me as it get’s back to basics. I strongly agree that first and foremost you have to have a usable site, that is kept up-to-date and satisfies customer’s information needs/tasks. These are the basics, it’s good to get back to basics - Thanks for the reminder Gerry.

    Regards,
    Mark Vozzo (Sydney, Australia)

  4. Ryan Kennedy says:

    Added on January 21st, 2009 at 2:02 am

    It’s time to go through our robots.txt file again and cull some content…

  5. Tavis Yeung says:

    Added on January 21st, 2009 at 10:44 pm

    Great post and the advice is bang-on. With all the automated tools and systems that are being cranked out these days to “game” the search engines in the hopes of 1st page rankings, it is absolutely paramount that the search engines weed out the riff-raff and can recognize what is HUMAN generated content as opposed to scraped content.

    As Glenn mentioned above, Apple ranks very highly for the term computer without even mentioning the keyword “computer” on its pages - this is yet another example of Google’s latent semantic indexing at work where it can tell the “theme” of a website based on all the OTHER terms contained - in this case, google knows that this website most definitely has to do with “computers” amongst google visitors even though the content hasn’t been necessarily “optimized” for the keyword “computer”. In reverse, if you were to Google “apple” - Google knows that the more popular topic amongst visitors that search for “apple” is in fact the apple computer company which ranks #1 as opposed to the fruit. LSI is a very smart thing ;)

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