Some of the Port80 team traveled to Redmond the other day for an IIS 7 briefing and, in the airport on the way back, overheard an interesting conversation regarding techniques to make your site search-engine friendly -- whereupon one of our own team members just about blew a fuse.
It would seem that many people really do believe that all it takes to get a high rank in Google is the right combination of file names, meta tags, word ordering, etc. Now you've probably heard this SEO pitch a few thousand times as well, and with repetition almost comes belief -- which must be why advertisers and politicians use it so much. But this particular P80 team member is a contrarian by nature, and for him this was the straw that broke the camel's back. So here is a reconstruction of that P80 employee's rant on search engine ranking for your reading pleasure:
I'm sorry but you don't deserve to be #1 in Google. If your little site doesn't have any meaningful content on the topic X, why would Google want you to be #1 for a query on X!? They wouldn't--it isn't in their best interest. If you even slightly understand Google's business model you know it is about selling AdWords right? Well stay with me -- they sell AdWords to an audience, the audience comes to Google because they get good search results. Now if you figure out how to game the system to get ranked #1 for query X even though you are some small fry with a site with limited data on that subject, then the search results are not going to make Google's visitors that happy. Google really doesn't want you there unless you really to deserve to be there and as they improve things or catch you, you will drop - guaranteed! So here's an idea for you -- spend all that money you waste with these Search Engine snake oil people on something called REASONABLE CONTENT!!!! Yes, there is a novel idea -- actually write something interesting on a subject that you actually know something about. If you are the leader in topic X and that is the query you want rank #1 on, then it should be no problem to come up with the killer content on that subject and very likely you will get higher ranking without doing much of anything else. Oh, and by the way, your customers might even like the legitimate content in your site too! OK, rant over, pass the asprin!
He was clearly a bit round the bend, as you can see, but after all it had been a long day. Yet, despite the ravings there is a lot of sense to be had here. Apart from intelligent search engine focused page modifications like having navigation a search bot can actually follow (instead of Flash or JavaScript navigation), not using frames or burying data in binaries, and avoiding unnecessary dynamic pages -- apart from these commonsense things, the rest pretty much does come back to content. If you have done things right, such that your pages are visible to the world it ultimately comes back to the simple idea - content is king. If you have some good content people will likely come check it out. We speak from experience, since most customers don't come to Port80 for our awesome HTML skills and meta tag management!