Making Web Pages for Visitors, Not Search Engine Bots

Author: H. Balsagnia

SEO is like wine-making: There's not one exact way to do it, some are better at it than others, similar techniques can deliver widely differing results, and most of you idiots shouldn't be messing around with it because you're going to screw something up and blow up your basement for god's sake.

Every person who is new to the SEO game (usually someone who fires up their very first site and finally realizes after 9 months that you don't just magically appear on Google's first page) has the misconception that SEO is a practice of trickery and tomfoolery, to foil the search engines to list your site at the top because you've manipulated your site to be just what they're looking for. For the most part, this is wrong......it's not completely wrong in every facet of the idea....but it is the wrong way of looking at things.

So you use some program like Web Position and try to manipulate every word of every sentence of every paragraph on your site, and adjust your paragraphs to fall into certain table cells, and tweak your meta description a zillion times until the software says that your site is exactly what the search engine bots are looking for. Well you've probably just wasted a lot of time. True, certain engines can be manipulated more than others. Chock the top and middle of your home page with the keyword you're targeting, and chances are you'll get into MSN's top 50 within a short amount of time. But Yahoo and, to an exponentially grander extent, Google will not give a flying fig about your site. Here's why: Because Google's web bot is smarter than you (and naturally, to a lesser extent, so is Yahoo's). A few years ago, you could tweak and bump and fiddle with your web page's content and do fairly well getting high up in search results. Well this is a problem, because nobody wants to see your worthless web page that serves no useful purpose.

Why is it worthless? Because you've spent all your time tweaking and fiddling, and you haven't written any actual, real content!!! Google, and the others are following, realize that any pointless, spammy, viagra-selling, penis-enlarging, naked-teen-having site could get near the top just by optimizing their page to seem ""important"" to the crawlers. Luckily for us, Google got smart, and Google is getting smarter. If you've read my other articles, then you've already heard me say that you can NOT figure out Google's algorithm. Google employs a squadron of nerds that you couldn't even imagine. If you took your high school's chess team, an entire Star Trek convention, AND a genetically-mutated strand of Dustin Diamond's DNA and combined them.........you still wouldn't have something that could outsmart Google. They're even hiring people away from Microsoft.....read up on it! You should just come to grips with the fact that you will not figure out Google's master plan on selecting websites for search results. Their algorithm is ever-changing, ever-evolving, and ever-becoming-more-and-more-impossible-to-deciher-by-us-common-id iots.

So if we can't figure out what Google wants from us, how are we supposed to make a site that will rank well? This is what you're asking now, right? Well, Google's webmaster sections on their website will tell you this (but since you still haven't read it, I guess I'll tell you....again) to make a QUALITY website with USEFUL content that somebody would ACTUALLY want to VISIT. The only thing that I can say with confidence regarding Google's method of choosing search results is that they are looking for useful content that real people can find useful. ""But how can they tell what is useful to a person, unless they are using hundreds of real people to surf the web and hand-pick useful sites?"" That's what you're asking me right now in a ""retarded-lispy-slurred-william-huangish"" voice. Well the answer........ I already told you........ Google is smarter than you! They are seriously advanced in this silly world of websites and computers and easily-attainable wang-growing pills.

If I can suggest anything about Google's algorithm, it would be that the Google nerds have made it their life's goal to make the Google web bot ""smart"" enough to be able to tell the difference between manipulated, worthless, ""optimized"" content, and real, useful, thoughtful, ACTUAL content. In this day and age, if people can think it, then people can program some computer software to think it too.

So what am I trying to say with all of this? I'm saying that if you want your website to rank well in any engine (especially Google), you need to spend time making a site that serves a useful purpose. Your site full of adsense ads, or keywords ranging from aardvarks to nipple rings to zeppelins when all you sell is schlong-strengthening tablets is not useful to anybody.

Don't get me wrong, you don't have to just offer free advice and articles and information to the hippie dirtbags who might visit your site. You can have a successful business site which sells your product or service, but it needs to be useful to those hippies on TOP of a business promotion for your company. You better have some interesting facts about carpet shampooing or whatever the hell your company does. You're a real estate agent? Well slap up a few dozen pages on your site about homeowner issues (let me help you, I know you real estate agents are kind of slow...... an article about preparing your house to sell quickly....an article about simple home improvements you can do yourself....an article about what to look for when buying a new house....an article about financing and credit concerns.........see, its not so hard....these things would be found useful to a person looking to buy or sell a house).

To conclude, Google's web crawler is quickly becoming intelligent enough to determine automatically what is and is not useful content. Reciprocal linking will help to an extent, but since everyone on earth has traded links with four thousand other worthless sites, that's not going to contribute much to how Google positions you. Make your web pages visually attractive and easy to navigate for PEOPLE. And for Pete's sake, put useful text and other media on there, and not just paragraph upon paragraph of keyword-laced phrases that end up looking like they were written by the aforementioned cockeyed, tone-deaf retard.

About the author: H. Balsagnia is a writer and contributor for several sites, including the music site http://www.roamingbovine.com , and web hosting site http://www.paradigmwebh osting.com . He writes mostly about his several and widely unique personal interests including computers & the web, music, food, money, his pets, security, and more.