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April 17, 2008

SEO reality

SEO reality: Neat points raised by Google's VP of search quality, Udi Manber: "I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages... The content provider should think about how users will look for their content, and the user should think about what words people use to write about their content... You should think about what you expect to see in the actual page and search for that." Full bodytext (much less database text) is only rarely needed to satisfy a search query... usually you anticipate which terms your audience will use when trying to find your service, and on which you can reasonably compete to get on that first page of results. If your URL, TITLE, metadata and bodytext all include these terms, and if you can get external links with these terms as inbound anchor text, then you've got a good chance of being found by your audience as they will tend to search for you. I've got prior examples for rutabagas and flowers, and hit that "visualize the page on which the info lives" tip back in 2003. SEO experts may be suspect, but I'm happy to see that the people inside Google agree that the basics are much simpler: figure out how people will try to find you, and optimize for that.

Posted by JohnDowdell at April 17, 2008 1:07 PM