Traditionally, SEO has been technical. SEO companies have changed code, constructed extra pages of one sort or another, plugged sites into link exchanges and so on.
You can see why. About a decade or so ago, the first search engines weren’t equipped to read the page content – their programming was rudimentary and the hardware wasn’t up to the task in hand. And because early search engines only read the meta tags and header information, there’s still the lingering misapprehension amongst an alarming number of people that all SEO consists of is ‘doing the meta tags’.
These days, the search engines are far more sophisticated, and read and analyse the actual copy in the body of the page – and because meta tags are still often stuffed with junk, the meta tags are largely just ignored. So it’s the copy itself that you need to use to communicate with both the search engines and your human readers. Search engines like to be given a hand by weighting the copy through subtle use of key phrases – and for the benefit of your human audience, make sure your copy also obeys all the rules of good copywriting.
When we’re asked to make strategic recommendations for Web sites, the copy usually fails in a number of ways. It’s non-existent or too short. Or doesn’t communicate the key phrases the client is interested in. Or sometimes the content is so packed with key words that the site is being downgraded by the search engines and given up on by human readers.
Oh, and back to the technical aspects of SEO. Even Paul Silver, our Head of Technical SEO at Web Positioning Centre, had to agree with my pitch to a prospective client that technical SEO, while it’s vitally important, is there to provide a solid platform for the content.
Related posts: