Google teaches SEO

Published by ndixon on November 29th, 2008 1 Comment »

Google recently released its own document on how to optimise your site for their search engine. An interesting development from the company that spends a lot of time battling against heavy-handed SEO techniques.

Google has a number of stock answers for SEO related questions, most of which revolve around advice to build content for users, that’s easy to navigate, is relevant and accessible. Makes a great deal of sense when you think about it.

They want to reward sites that do well in providing quality, unique content for their visitors. But with the growth of the web, only an automated solution is viable, and automation leads to algorithms, variables, and ultimately, attempts to circumvent and/or manipulate the technology.

Out of the Horse’s mouth

I get asked daily to give an overview of the fundamental basics of SEO. What the majority of these questioners want is the one, secret technique – because there must be one, right? – that pro SEO’ers use to get top listing in Google’s SERPs. They are usually disappointed with my answers, which allude to lots of effort creating and marketing original content.

With the release of Google’s SEO guide, I just point them at its pages. You can download here (pdf).

Who better to tell you what they want from you?

Google are in the best position to let you know what they want to see on (and off) a web page to consider it for a good ranking in search results. If you know anything about SEO, then there really are no surprises within these pages. Even SEO pros should give it a read or two to remind ourselves of the basics and most important elements in ranking well for Google.

Hurting the professional SEO business?

What could be the motive of Google releasing this document, could they be trying to hurt the professional SEO business? It’s not much of a stretch of the imagination to consider, as a friend recently suggested to me, that by openly spreading around what are the fundamental principles of Google SEO, it weakens the efforts of professional SEO’s as now anyone can run with these techniques.

But the “secrets” of SEO are no secrets at all. The knowledge of what to do is freely available across the web and though no professionals cling to the idea that professional SEOs hold the most powerful techniques close to their chests, this simply in not true.

In fact, the secret to SEO can be boiled down to two words: focused perseverance.
Success with achieving top search engine positions, and the resulting traffic if you have targeted your audience correctly, is a matter of time, effort, and slowly inching your way up the SERPs. There simply are no shortcuts.

The bottom line of this is if you follow the directions offered in the Google SEO document, you stand a very good chance of ranking well on the Google SERPs.

It’s that “hard” part that puts people off

The SEO industry can rest comfortably in their beds. My personal experience is that no matter how much information you offer people, it’s the “hard work” element that stalls their progress – not necessarily that they do not want to engage in the time investment, but that they generally simply do not have the time to invest.

It takes time to see the results of day-after-day grinding at the various on and off page techniques, and the tasks do seem worthless, particularly when ranks appear to be slipping (not uncommon at the immediate outset of strategic SEO activity).

Setting out on a strategic SEO plan, one must look six months or more ahead before seeing strong, stable results of directed effort. Now and then results appear sooner. But more often than not, rapid results fluctuate week after week; stable, predictable results take time.

Tags: Google, SEO, SERPs
Posted in Google | 1 Comment »