Paul Boag wrote a post at his site Boagworld asking many questions about SEO. I started writing a comment on his blog, but it grew to become longer than his post and the questions and comments he had about SEO. I decided to post my response here.

In his post, Why I don’t get SEO, he had five reasons why he had doubts about SEO. My response doesn’t address his concerns in the order that he asked them. It touches upon some of the comments written by others as well. If you have questions or concerns about SEO that aren’t addressed in this response, please ask them in the comments below.

What is Good SEO?

Good SEO is not “cheating the system,” or “manipulating search results.” Good SEO is part of a marketing plan that makes it more likely that good content you create is found by people interested in what your website has to offer.

SEO should identify the objectives behind a site and the audiences the site was for. It should have an understanding of the best ways to present information to those audience members. It should also allow them to complete tasks that they may have come to the site to fulfill. It should also research the words and phrases that the audience may use to find that site and expect to see on its pages.

SEO can include:

  • Suggestions for improved information architecture
  • HTML coding
  • Avoiding approaches that keep search engine crawlers from indexing content
  • Keyword research
  • Competitive analysis of other sites in the same market
  • Development of unique selling propositions
  • Improvement of conversions
  • Analytics and how to use analytics to make positive and meaningful changes to a site

SEO is more than creating great content or including keywords in titles and headings that you want to rank for, and following good practice in design involving standards and intelligent structured semantic design.

SEO is more than good web design

Good web design helps, but some days I wonder if good web design is the exception rather than the rule. Here are a small number of design-related problems I often see on web pages:

  1. Poor page titles, or no titles at all. A Yahoo study of 1,000,000 random URLs described in a Yahoo patent filed in 2008, Generating Succinct Titles for Web URLs (US Patent Application 20100049709), noted that 17 percent of the pages they found didn’t have page titles.

  2. Many site owners include important textual information such as their address in text pictures rather than actual text. A common example sites where that information is crucial, such as the address of the business behind sites for restaurants, shops, and businesses that provide services in specific geographical areas. The Google Webmaster Guidelines note the following:

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

  1. Many content management systems and eCommerce platforms are set up so pages can be accessed at more than one URL, which can lead to search engines not indexing all of the pages of a site that they might, and having link equity or PageRank being spread amongst the same page at more than one URL. I’ve seen at least one site with the same page content indexed by Google at more than a thousand different URLs.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft were all granted patents last week on methods that they can use to address that problem, but there’s no guarantee from the search engines that they are using those methods on every site that they find, and resolving those problems rather than hoping the search engines will understand them is the best approach.

In a recent interview with Google’s Matt Cutts, he suggests solving the problem of duplicate content at different URLs:

Typically, duplicate content is not the largest factor on how many pages will be crawled, but it can be a factor. My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the site architecture upfront because then you don’t have to worry as much about duplicate content issues and all the corresponding things that come along with it.

  1. Many web hosts set up domains for new site owners so that the same content can be displayed on those domains both with and without a “www.” While the search engines may pick up on the fact that the same content exists at more than one domain, usually they don’t.

  2. Many websites fail to use words in title elements, heading elements, anchor text, and page content that their intended audiences will both likely search for and expect to see on their pages.

SEO isn’t about making great content and stuffing it with keyword phrases, but rather about creating great content that includes intelligent choices of words used within that content, meaningful images used on pages, and multimedia content that can be indexed well.

Why site owners can’t just create great content

The number and kind of ranking signals that search engines use to rank pages go beyond good web design as well. Microsoft noted in their paper, FRank: A Ranking Method with Fidelity Loss (pdf), that they based their rankings of pages on 619 different query dependent and query independent features.

Google representatives have stated many times in the past few years that they look at more than 200 different signals to determine how pages might be ordered in search results.

There are several initial steps that a site owner can take that make it more likely that a search engine crawling program can find all of the URLs on their site, index the content found there, and display those pages in search results.

But, an SEO has no control over changes that competitors might make to their sites, or search engines might make to their algorithms, or the interest that potential visitors might have in the products or services or information found upon a site. There are no guarantees.

Marketing is an ongoing endeavor, and effective SEO is also an ongoing endeavor that requires a knowledge of the framework within which a site exists on the Web, going beyond an understanding of how to present pages to search engines and visitors. An SEO constantly studies search engines, often including reading patent filings and white papers and blog posts and press releases and interviews from the search engines, experimenting on sites that aren’t mission-critical, and observing and anticipating changes about how the Web (and not just search engines) works.

Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts recently wrote a post, Google, transparency and our not-so-secret formula, at Google’s European Public Policy Blog about some of the efforts that they take to educate web site publishers, including publishing hundreds of research papers, participating in conferences and forums, and through many blog posts and help pages. They do provide a great amount of information, probably more than most site owners can manage to keep up with, which is why it can be helpful to have an SEO work with them.

Search engines do have sophisticated algorithms that they use, based upon human assumptions that attempt to address problems programmatically, sometimes at the cost of false positives and false negatives. For example, Google announced a couple of months ago that they started to expand some queries to include synonyms for words used in searchers’ queries. They stated in the Official Google Blog post, Helping computers understand language, that the method worked well most of the time, only failing badly one time for every fifty times it worked well.

A fifty to one ratio sounds like a small number of bad results, but when you’re talking about possibly billions of queries a month, it could end up being a fairly large number of bad results. Here’s what the Official Google Blog post stated about their approach to expanding queries:

Most of the time, you probably don’t notice when your search involves synonyms because it happens behind the scenes. However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.

We took a set of these queries, analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

Good SEO enhances the quality and usability of web sites

Good SEO should enhance a visitor’s experience with a website rather than damaging it, or entail stuffing pages with unreadable content, or mean adding unusable navigation that doesn’t advance that goal.

Good SEO should help with the creation of intelligently crafted copy rather than excessive copy.

Good SEO should lead to navigation that makes it more likely that people can and will visit pages that meet their informational and transactional needs.

The goal of SEO is to make it more likely that a site owner meets the objectives behind their site and visitors find what they are looking for.

SEO is responsive

SEO is not a broadcast approach to marketing. It’s not a one-time ad that shows up on TV or the radio, or a newspaper. SEO is passive about broadcast media. SEO can be used as part of a marketing plan that also includes those approaches, but it recognizes that people will go to a search engine when they have a need to find information, or a task to perform that they can do online.

A website is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If pages from a site are visible in search results for queries that people are performing to meet those needs, rather than when the owner of a site decides to broadcast what their business or organization offers, it can often be more effective than TV or radio Print.

One of the questions that I ask people when they first start doing SEO for their sites is, “What is it about your site and what you offer that gets people to talk about it, to recommend it to others, to bookmark it, and link to it?” A website should appeal to people, and SEO should not only avoid getting in the way of that appeal but should enhance it.

Good SEO adds value to a website and to the person or business or organization behind it and creates a better experience for people who have needs that they are trying to meet through the Web.