It’s easy to learn SEO, but do you understand it?

At dinner tonight I asked my 13 year-old son, Timmy (oops, I mean Tim!) how school was going. He attends a charter school and takes a lot of science classes. He mentioned that he wasn’t totally thrilled with his physics teacher because she wasn’t very good at explaining what things actually meant. She basically would just give the definition, and that was it, but he really wanted to understand everything. We asked him what specifically she didn’t explain well, and he mentioned “normal force.” His dad knows a lot about physics and proceeded to provide a clear explanation, even demonstrating it at the table. It was clear enough so that even I understood it, and I generally zone out when they have their physics conversations!

Tim got it right away, and I could see the wheels turning in his head as he thought about it and put it all together with what he already knew. I said something to the effect that he could now go back and explain it to all the other kids who probably didn’t get it either. He just laughed and said that most of them didn’t really care if they understood it or not, they were just happy to just “learn it” and be done with it. Which of course is fairly typical of most kids.

It made me laugh, because we see the same thing in SEO also. Everyone wants you to simply tell them how to do it, but half the time they never understand the reasons why they’re doing it.

Build links. Put keywords in Title tags. Create “great content.” But why? Because that’s what Google’s “guidelines” say? Bah. That’s one of the reasons I tell people never to even look at Google’s guidelines. They don’t teach you how to optimize, and they especially don’t explain to you why you’re optimizing in the first place, nor why you need to do what you need to do.

I’ve always said that the best SEOs need to think like a search engine (or search engineer).

What are search engines looking for?

• Search engines are not looking for the pages that use a keyword a specific number of times.
• Search engines are not looking for the pages that have 250 words.
• Search engines are not looking for the sites with the most number of pages.
• Search engines are not looking for the sites that are the most tightly “themed.

And the list goes on and on.

What search engines are actually looking for is this:

Search engines are looking for the pages that best satisfy that which the person typing words into the search box is looking for.

Sounds simple enough, but for some reason it’s a concept that is extremely hard for many people to grasp. However, once you come to grips with what that means and you really understand it, you’ll know exactly what SEO is and how to use it to bring targeted visitors to your site. You’ll never worry about keyword density, how many words you have on your page, and all those other old SEO wive’s tale things people are so fond of talking about.

Unfortunately, it’s not an easy concept to explain to people.  Let me know if you want me to try to clarify it further for you!

Posted by Jill on 05-06-2006 at 10:05 pm
Posted in Smart SEO Stuff with 5 Comments