Giving Search Engines What They Want

What does a search engine want your site to contain? What do you have to do to get your site high in the search engine rankings?

Much has been written about link spamming, optimising pages etc, but how often do you then need to be changing the pages to keep up with the ever changing search engines?

Maybe, instead of fighting search engines we should look at what they are trying to achieve and work with them.

For a start, they earn their income by displaying relevant adds. Fine if you want to advertise, but what else can we conclude? Simple - surfers are only clicking on the adverts if they are searching on that search engine (let's ignore for now contectual advertising on websites). If the surfer tries a search engine, gets poor results and then goes elsewhere, the first search engine has lost a customer.

Therefore, a search engine has to provide the best possible results for its visitors. Whether that site has the most links in, the most occurrences of the keywords or whatever doesn't matter to the person browsing the site - it's just whether the results are relevant.

And that's what ever search engine tries to achieve - matching as near as perfectly what the person types to the results shown and then providing an interesting an informative site on that subject.

Long term this is what we, as web designers, need to strive for. Over time search engines will refine their algorithms and penalise certain sites. But if your site is a well written site that is informative and relevant to the keywords then it should be hoped that eventually the search engines will pick up on it and list it well.

Working with the search engines, not against them. Reduce spam link building and help them to give people the best possible results. Long term, it should help us all.