Why search engines are stubborn

One theme you will find running right the way through what SEO experts do is that of "pandering to machines, not humans". If you appreciate this you will start to work a little more tacitly and understand why SEO experts have annoying ways of insisting on details you think are irrelevant.

Computers can only judge what humans program them to. In the case of web site rankings, humans set up algorithms for this purpose. The machines cannot make any interpretations themselves - imagine if they could, we'd have a terminator scenario on our hands in no time. SEO experts are merely learning how to interpret machines that don't change their point of view (unless the human masters tell them to). Don't expect to find judgements based on emotion, such as "but my web site is so much better than those higher up the list".

The colours of a web site, the amazing curves on the graphics and the poetry of the text mean absolutely nothing to machines interpreting algorithms - think about why a SEO expert might be telling you this (it's because we hear it frequently in the form of protestations).The only way a computer can tell anything about a picture is if you use a description of it in the code it's looking for. If you have a picture of a mouse but label it as an elephant, you'll find it somewhere in Google images when you search for pictures of elephants (it may well be on the five millionth page of course). However, whilst machines don't care for these things, they can appreciate value.

Beware, computers are learning

Google has taught them how to order adwords on more than just the value of bids. If an "adwords" advert is worth 10p a click, then you might think that an advert that is worth £1 a click would naturally be higher in the list (so Google could make more money). Not so, if 100 people choose to click on an advert worth 10p for every 1 person that clicks on the £1 ad, you can tell the 10p advert makes £10 for Google whereas the £1 advert makes £1 in the same time. This illustrates how search engines can learn to make judgements automatically for humans (it also explains the fundamentals of adwords).

How machines tell what people want for search results

You're probably thinking keywords already. Of course you would be partly right. So what does it mean when clients protest there aren't enough keywords on their page. When we take new clients on, invariably we find every meta tag stuffed to the hilt with every connotation of keyword appropriate to their business. And how they protest when we start by taking all the keyword stuffing out as our first job!

You are probably doing the job of "spam police" for the search engines yourself...

Search engines look at the content on a page and compare it to what you are telling them this content is about - and the keyword tag is nearly always the most revealing method of subterfuge! When they find hundreds of words in the keyword tag that aren't in the copy of the page - they know straightaway that someone is attempting to get the page high up their rankings without it being particularly relevant to anything, much less the search term you are probably trying to get attention for. Now they have to mark this page down because you've told them it's irrelevant to the keywords!

There's more than one way to skin a spammer!

The science of "latent semantic indexing" is about being able to tell which types of words usually occur together, just like they would in a normal conversation. University graduates of the highest order put concepts like this one together precisely so machines can make judgements about what you're up to. Finding appropriate words to the subject in the page text is now almost certainly a way search engines judge the authenticity of the content. Hands up who still thinks they are smart enough to outwit these people!

Few is nearly always more when it comes to keywords

Just take another look at that sub-title again - and again - and again. If you say your page is about "coats, waistcoats, plastic macs, rain coats, fancy dress coats, black coats, red jackets, military trench coats (we could go on) then what chance do you have of geting the search engines to rank you highly for "party coats" if that's what the page is attempting to sell?

Perhaps your keyword tag should say "party coats, fashion coats, evening coats, special occasion coats, lace coats, satin coats (etc). Perhaps search engines might just be clever smart enough to figure out "coats party fashion evening special occasion lace velvet satin (etc)" without needing all those "coats"? Of course your page would have to contain all those words, but I expect you can see how this page is obviously about coats for special occasions. "Plastic macs" would not be appropriate to stuff in there, even if you did sell them. It might just fit onto another page better! Frankly, the keyword tag is not the place for "intelligent keyword inclusion".

Can you start to piece together why "some knowledge" and "expertise" are quite different things?

It is the subtleties and ways of combining different elements that will move your pages up the rankings, and most importantly application to repetitive hard work like link building. Only a period of time can prove whether your choice of SEO expert can do this, that's why we have formulated a very special offer for you to get to know our work. Click here to find out what that deal is and get your site on the road to earning income for you (and boy are you going to need it if the political pundits are right about the state of our economy!)