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How to end search engine slavery

Posted by admin on February 9, 2007 in SEO Theory

Years ago, in an SEO forum far, far away, a business site operator complained that he was unable to get any productive rankings on search engines. I asked him what he was doing to build traffic to his site. His reply: “I’m trying to improve my search engine rankings.”

We went back and forth for a while and finally I said, “What would you do if there were no search engines?”

At that point, he began to understand what I was trying to tell him. In search engine optimization, depending on search engines for traffic is like sending your dog out for the newspaper in a yard filled with tennis balls. The odds of things not happening the way you expect increase dramatically if you focus just on the search engine results.

There are good reasons for treating your Web pages as if they won’t be promoted by search engines. The most important reason is that when you stop trying to chase the algorithm you tend to create content that is more human friendly. Not always. Some people, in seeking liberation from search engine slavery, head straight for the Flash Intro pages. Well, approximately 1/3 of all people leave a site with an intro page rather than click through to the content. You either learn that lesson or you don’t.

But let’s assume you’re one of the people who understands that intro pages are counter-productive. You want traffic, you want conversions. You don’t need an intro page to feed your ego. Your dog does that for you (when there are no tennis balls around).

So if you set out about the task of designing a page that tells people what you do, what you have to offer, and which shows them why your content is valuable, you tend to do exactly what you should be doing if you’re chasing the algorithm.

That is, the search engines are looking for relevance. Algorithmically, they are just trying to capture the essence of the human page creator’s judgement about what a page is relevant for. Sure, the search engines look at links to a certain extent, but the great lie of search engine optimization is that you have to build relevance through links. Relevance is built strictly, solely, and only through content — content that may or may not be on or off the page.

When you remove the search engine from your marketing plan, what value will your page offer to people who are just randomly clicking on links, advertisements, and following suggestions from their friends and co-workers?

Link baiters have lulled many people into falsely believing that social tagging sites are a good substitute for search engines. But that’s not really the case, because like the search engines the social tagging services want to promote the best, most relevant content possible. And social tagging services rely more on human judgement than anything else.

If you don’t have a site that provides real, unique value to strangers, all the search engines and social tagging sites on the Web won’t help you make conversions. So why bother bringing that traffic in?

And think about the value you offer to everyone, not just to the other people who use your favorite operating system and browser. What if you provide a product, service, or information that is vital to people who rely upon screen reading software, cell phone browsing, UNIX character-based browsing, or other limited means of access to the Internet?

What good will all your gizmos and images do you if the peopel who need your site most cannot see what it is, what it offers them, and how to use it to improve their lives?

Eliminating the search engines and social tagging sites from your Web marketing plan forces you to look at your design in ways you should have been looking at it all along. Accessible pages are very, very well optimized pages. They have to be optimized because the optimization is for people, not machines, but people look for the same cues that search engines look for.

When you stop obsessing over search engine rankings, you empower yourself to look beyond the limited returns of search engine optimization. As I write this, I see that in the first 6 days of this month Xenite.Org received over 6500 referrals from Google.com/search. That’s not bad for organic search, is it? But in that same period Xenite.Org has received over 25,000 visits. If I lose my Google rankings today I’ll lose some traffic but not all of it.

I’ve been chasing the long tail of search for years — the fact people have given this style of optimization a new name doesn’t mean it’s working any differently now than it did 7 years ago. You have an opportunity with every Web page to capture traffic from search, but you also have an opportunity to capture traffic from other sources.

What people today call the long tail of search is just a subset of the broad range of potential referrals. Referrals don’t just come from search engines: they also come from email, other Web sites, advertising, and offnet media. Every page you add to your Web site should act like its own microcosmic Web. It is a world unto itself, connecting to all other worlds on the Web.

Call that the long arm of content. Content reaches out to more than just search engines. But if the content is effective enough to collect referrals from non-search sources, it is usually effective enough to collect referrals from search engines, too.

This is what I call “the power of the page”. The Web page is independent of any strategy. It presents a whole concept and encapsulates value that you determine through your design and choice of content. Your Web page empowers you, and the more unique, valuable pages you create, the more power you accumulate. To put this into a different perspective, let’s add the search engines back in. But now suppose that, instead of there being no search engines, there are simply no links to your site.

Most SEOs would tell you that you are dead in the water. But that’s simply not true. After all, you have options. You can build traffic without search engines, and as your traffic increases people will begin to link to your site. And yet, what if all your links point only toward one page? If you have many pages, you have to find a way to persuade search engines to index all your other pages and rank them for relevant queries.

Many ecommerce site operators face just that challenge. So do many large content site operators. I recently decided to move about 30,000 pages of content on one of my domains. Why? The pages needed to be redesigned, updated, and I didn’t want to overlay existing URLs with potentially bad content in case I made a mistake. Experience has taught me that the safest way to update 30,000 pages of content is simply to change the URLs. I leave the old content up, block robots from crawling it again, and when the new URLs are indexed I remove the old ones.

Most of those 30,000 pages have only one link pointing to them — an internal link. The majority will probably end up in the Supplemental Results Index on Google, at least for a while. But even there in the Supplemental Index those pages can bring in traffic as people find them through browsing, obscure queries, and occasional referrals from friends. In time, many thousands of those pages will be fully indexed, they will pass value, and they will be found by more queries.

And while it’s possible I have introduced a new problem, I still have the old pages to fall back on. I can block robots from the new directory at any time, change my site map, and update all navigational links to ensure that people get to only one version of the archive. With 30,000 Web pages, I really don’t need external links pointing to every page. I’ll eventually links to some key deep content pages and they’ll help get the deepest pages crawled and indexed.

In the meantime, I’ve already begun promoting those pages in ways that don’t take the search engines into account. After all, I have the content. All I have to do is tell people where to find it. The rest follows naturally. I’ve done this before.