Web Content, SEO and Web Bots
Why do SEO's Word Things The Way They Do? Because Googlebot responds to the headlines people usually type!
It's a "Match Game": if your content matches what people search, and they way they search it - you win!
Communicating simultaneously with web bots and humans is like walking a tightrope - too far in either direction and you fall.
When you hire someone to optimize and market your web site you are hiring a translator - to talk to computers (web robots) in their own language. What may make perfect sense in a conversation, could fail miserably in a bid for search results.
| Copy Writing |
= Communicating concepts to people |
| SEO |
= Communicating concepts to computers |
The trick is doing both, at the same time - effectively. There will be some minor compromises, but it has to be done if you want to succeed.
Writing for SEO is like distilling whiskey - it takes a lot of brewer's beer to distill a pint of whiskey. Web bots like a concept distilled down to its essence!
How You Describe Your Business may take an hour - how an SEO describes your business to Google's mainframes is limited to a few nanoseconds!
Web Bots are "Artificial Intelligence"?
Unlike the robots in a movie, web bots have no physical form and they don't have any true ability to judge the abstract. They are programmed to respond to verbal signals - keywords, key phrases, anchor text and what the anchors lead to.
They also compare matching content on sites and how many keywords are on a single page - and much more!
Web Bots take every word of web content literally - they don't know what "you really mean!"
Let's say you're a car dealership with your main location in Tampa, and two smaller lots in nearby St Petersburg and Clearwater.
Telling your SEO - "don't use the phrase "Tampa Auto Dealership" because you don't want to limit yourself to your Tampa location, is the wrong approach."
The robots only know what you explicitly DO tell them...SO - if you operate mainly in Tampa , then you concentrate your efforts as a "Tampa Auto Dealership" - then also specify the St Petersburg and Clearwater locations on sub-pages. You don't broaden your range by leaving out specifics. You broaden your range by broadening your list OF specifics.
Web Content is a match game!
Selecting a Domain Name
Having keywords in a domain name work better if they are separated by hyphens.
- www.fishing.com - search engines see "fishing", separated from other characters by a dot on either side
- www.fishingvacations.com - keywords lost without hyphens - search engines scan all the characters between www. & .com.
- www.fishing-vacations.com - search engines see "fishing" and "vacations" because you used a hyphen to separate the string of characters into two recognizable words. The search engines will search the hyphenated words in any and all combinations of order.
