SEO Bots VS Humans
Good Afternoon Everybody,
The all important first search engine result page (SERP) on Google and the subsequent value of SEO seem to be running
Google Logo
a lot of web marketing ideas these days. Well, I am a web marketer. I am interested in SEO, but more important to me is the value and experience for the user. Does it matter how many SERs you have per page if none of these visitors to those results will end up customers?
I have been thinking a lot about this subject lately and I have come to the conclusion that SEO efforts that write for/attempt to market to search engines is just ridiculous. It leads us as marketers to black hat tactics and ultimately to experiences that the consumer does not enjoy. By Black Hat, I mean using trickery or unethical means of beating organic SERPs. Strategies like link farms, stealing or duplicating content, creating unmanned or spam social sites. For a list of tons more black hat (bad and stupid) ideas visit Beanstalk.
It seems to me that all of the big search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo are moving to algorithms that lend more and more credibility to user activity whether that be direct voting or off-site promotion of the content. So, you want a strategy that will get you a higher search engine result and one that will get readers more interested in you and your products. Here’s one for ya: create interesting, unique content on a consistent basis. If you do this readers will want to read and share and link to it. The bots will pick up on that activity and your new keyword strength and reward you accordingly.
Oh, and just to show that I am not the only one with this mindset. Check out this quote from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
-The basic common sense principle would be NOT to utilize anything that you would not implement if the search engines didn’t exist, or in short:
“Make pages for users, not for search engines.”
So go out and create great content and get users to share it for you. What are some of your most successful SEO tactics. Check out the Big 16 rules for SMO tactics on the Online Marketing Blog.
Best of luck,
Will Flavell
