SEO Misunderstandings

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 14. November 2010 - 18:29

There seem to be a major misunderstanding when people talk about SEO, the Search Engine Optimization. Google has 2 priorities: make money and make itself indispensable to its users by providing great services. I was at one of Matt Cutts talk and he explained it fairly well, I hope I can make it also clear. Who is Matt Cutts and why he is such an important guy?

Hi, my name is Matt Cutts and I joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. I'm currently the head of Google's web spam team, aka quality control.

Meaning that anytime someone "monkeys" with Google's ranking, he investigates and fixes it. He has many articles on Google's ranking. Google has always been a very secretive company. They could open-source and publish their algorithm if they wanted. It's that secrecy that lead to the rise of the search engine optimization industry/scams.

There 4 separate processes and they are almost independent.

  1. Getting indexed by Google, Bing… “All” search engines use the sitemap to decide what to read from your website. Even if a webpage is in the sitemap.xml or the sitemap.xml.gz file, doesn't mean that Google or the others will actually read it or even index it.

  2. SEO, the Search Engine Optimization stuff: That's what you do to help the search engine decide if “you are” a worthwhile web page or not.

    Please note that no search engine rank websites, they only deal and rank web pages.

  3. The user request: what the person asked in the search box. It has nothing to do with any search engine optimization. The display of the search results has nothing to do with search optimization but with what the search engine “thinks” is the “best” information possible. There's no connection between the SEO and the “best” information possible.

    According to Google research, the “best” information possible is an HOW TO. According to Google that's what people use the search engines for.

    Search engines have learned that the “best” information possible is the only way of staying in business as a search engine. From 12 English major search engines in the 90s, we are now down to 2 major search engines: Google and MS/Bing. Yahoo did a deal with Microsoft and Facebook uses Microsoft's Bing. Most of the others like Excite, Cool, Ask, Altavista have either transformed as portals or have a market share of less than 1 point. In the 90s and early 2000s, the ranking used to be weighted according to what the website paid. Now it's only in the Ad or sponsored section.

  4. The user choosing to click on “this” or “that”. The search engine has no control over it. You, the website owner, have control over it by having a fantastic web page title and an equally fantastic web page description that will entice the user on clicking on your link.

Another point about the search engine optimization:

  • You can be the first web page listed for your term.
  • You can get thousands of people coming to your website.

And nobody's buying!

Please note that it's very easy to be ranked #1. I can get any photographer ranked #1 with only a half dozen of web pages if the user request is:

Wedding Photographer at Night on Top of Grouse Mountain in a Wheelchair

Grouse is a small mountain, actually a large hill, just 30 minutes from Downtown Vancouver, Canada.