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The SEO Thing

The SEO Thing

It's still true after all these years that content is your key to high rankings in search engines. What I find astonishing is that people who perform search engine optimization for companies still try to hide behind the curtain when it comes to how they do their jobs. There are dozens of SEO tools out there, and it seems, just like fishermen, everyone has their special box of bait for search engines. I recently applied for a job at a very big company for a search engine analyst position. The people I talked to were so stereotypically smug about what they do they didn't even consider that much of what they do is unnecessary and mostly a sort of ritualized Kabuki theater of web adjustments. They don't even consider in a strategic or tactical way, that content is what draws in search engines. And by content, I mean the basics: words and pictures with labels.

The problem most websites have with content that draws search engines is the much larger problem most websites have in general about posting "tangible content," or content that demonstrates what the website is all about. If you have a website that sells picture frames, you should have lots of text copy about picture frames and lots of labeled images showing picture frames. And, if you want to dominate a local market, say, picture frames in Hopkins, Minnesota, you should have lots of text copy of picture frames and lots of text copy about Hopkins, Minnesota ("the picture frame capital of the upper midwest?").

So why don't these SEO techs just beef up the content, write some more text copy and put in some great images with labels? Because they're not capable: few can write two sentences and make them sound like they go together. When faced with a client's website that is starvingly short on copy, they revert to the knobs, levers and controls behind their SEO curtains, hoping it will somehow bump their rankings and it may ... temporarily.

Wow, I've just given away all the SEO secrets. The main point here is it takes some old-fashioned, 20th Century editing and writing skills to make a successful website with the search engine rankings.

Want proof: go to google and type in "condos in Hopkins, MN" ... the second one listed is marketplaceandmain.com, something I created in 2007 and it's been little changed since then and still appears as #2 in google. The only technology used on that site is something called XML Sitemap, that catalogs a website to a specific standard that search engines enjoy. When you make a change to a website, it will automatically notify the search engines you select. This sitemap is not for users but for search engines but it only has a marginal effect in rankings. It's the content that draws the engines in and pushes the rankings up.

But note the Hopkins factoids throughout the marketplaceandmain.com website. Someone had to go out and get those, collate them, then put them on the website. Not rocket science ... just search engine optimization.

-Tim Corwin
May 2011

05/10/2011