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If your Web page could talk

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 4, 2007 in SEO Theory

If your Web site could talk to you, what would you want to ask it?

If your search results listings could talk, what would you ask them?

If you could talk to someone else’s Web site and search engine results listings, what would you ask them?

In search engine optimization we need to know many things about Web sites and their listings in search results. We need to know if there are internal linking problems, if there are server configuration issues, if scripts are not working properly. We need to know if our page layouts are impeding crawling. We need to know if we’re showing people (and spiders) which terms are most important to our pages.

We also need to know whether the search engines are getting everything they need from us in order to inform people about our pages. We need to know if the search engines are finding our content, if they feel it is important, and if they trust it. We need to know what the search engines think our content is relevant to. We need to know if people are looking for our content.

If Web pages could communicate with us, I would want to ask them which search expressions bring them traffic, which Web sites send them traffic, and how long people stay interested in them. I would want to ask those pages where they send the most traffic.

A lonely Web page would not have much to say. A popular Web page should be a chatter box. You can gauge how lonely a page is by how much information you can collect about it. The less information you can capture about a page, the fewer people who are visiting that page, the fewer queries for which that page is visible, the fewer linking relationships that page enjoys with other, active pages.

A lonely Web listing would not have much to say, either. It doesn’t appear often. It doesn’t send much traffic to its destination page. And it probably has a lot of company.

A useful exercise for search engine optimization is to collect as much information as you can about a Web page (a page, not a site). This information has nothing to do with how many links are pointing at it, what keywords are used in its title and URL. This information has to do with whether people visit the page, are likely to visit the page, or have the option of visiting the page.

High traffic Web documents enjoy high visibility through one or more channels: search results, online advertising, linkage, offline advertising, or word-of-mouth promotion. The traffic has to come from somewhere.

Low traffic Web sites have relatively little visibility. Visibility is tied directly to audience interest. You may rank 1st for 100 queries that are performed no more than 10 times per month. The odds of your getting more than 1,000 visitors per month are pretty limited. If you rank 1st for 1 query that is performed 1,000,000 times per month the odds of your getting more than 1,000 visitors per month are pretty good.

The information you need to know about a Web page focuses on its visibility: is it visible to search engines? Is it visible to searchers? Is it visible to surfers? Is it visible at all?

Page visibility cannot be measured in terms of inbound linkage. Nor can it be measured in terms of search results placement. Visibility can only be measured in terms of traffic. If a page is not receiving a lot of traffic, it’s either not visible or it’s not relevant to people’s interests.

Relevance and visibility are closely tied together. Relevance is directly tied to interest. The more interest your page generates, the more relevant it becomes to a growing number of people. Relevance is not based on keywords or queries but rather on people’s personal priorities. You want your page to attract as many interested visitors as possible.

If you could talk to your Web page, the best thing you could do is listen to it. Ask it questions and let it give you free, full, uninterrupted answers. You should take notes. You should compare your page notes with your listing notes. You should ask more questions.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a single Web page will tell you more about whether your search engine optimization efforts are working than graphing statistics for thousands of pages. When you know a page’s content intimately enough that you know why it ranks better than other content, you become less dependent upon inefficient SEO tactics like linking.

When you see how many queries a page’s content is relevant to, you become less obsessed with pursuing number 1 rankings for popular keywords and you start focusing on building traffic. Traffic does not come from targeted search expressions. It comes from compelling content. That content may or may not be shown in search results. It may or may not be placed on other Web sites.

If your content could talk, would it convince you it is compelling enough to persuade other people to follow your calls to action? If your content could talk, would it convince you that it is best in its class? If your content could talk, would you understand it?

Incoherent content, like incoherent site structure, can limit your options with search and Web marketing. You should be able to hold a dialogue with your Web pages and their search results listings. You should know what they would tell you and you should understand what they would be saying.

Do you really know what a Web document says about itself? Do you really know what a search result listing says about itself? Do you understand what they tell you when you look at them?