If Google Where Human

If you, like us, are constantly on the look-out for articles about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you’ve probably reached the same conclusion as we have – they are all starting to sound the same.

No-one in the industry ever gives away what they consider to be key tactics to improving search result rankings. Why would they, this is a commercial warzone.

Most SEO company staff still spend most of their time tweaking on-page elements such as copy, HTML tags and META data in the hope that they’ll come into work the next day and a miracle will have happened. While serious effort is always commendable Google, Yahoo and Bing are yet to be canonised so don’t hold your breath waiting for one of those miracles.

So where should we turn for SEO gold?

Here’s an idea: Think like a human! By that I mean approach SEO as though Google was a living, breathing person. Now if you were that person how would you decide what should come up first in search results?

If this approach sounds a bit too ‘new age’ for your liking you need to take a step back, count to 10 and read the idea above again.

Always remember that Google’s ultimate goal is to return the most relevant and timely results possible for the person performing a search. They want to appease human wants and needs.

What do you look for in search results? Here’s what I scan for:

• Fresh information, at least as recent as possible.
• Relevant information – does the information address my search?
• If there a lot of results I’d probably prefer local results (in my area or country perhaps).
• If the results presented are websites then I want them to work and to be easy to use.
• I don’t want content that is not human friendly. I.e. loaded with keywords making it hard to read.

You probably have list similar to this.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Your SEO strategy should simply be a reflection of your best effort to meet the expectations of these goals. Good rankings will follow.

And don’t sit back and rely of pages that have done well for you in the past. Recent changes to Google’s search ideology means that they really do go for recent information over older, stale results. Keep working, keep building.

Why not go back over some of your key pages right now and see how they stack up with this article in mind. And be honest – is your content really making the grade?!