I recently attended a creative writing course. It was wonderful! I learnt so much about writing, came away with some great tips and more importantly, I learned to enjoy writing again. As exciting as this is for me, this isn’t the reason for my post.
On said creative writing course, we were asked to review a piece of our own work. I explained that although I am happy to create and optimise content, I lack some confidence in my creativity.
“Optimise” said the tutor, “Not one of my favourite words”.
“Google don’t want you to optimise any more” came a voice from the back of the room.
Then from the table next to me, “Google will actually penalise you for optimising now”. I think I even heard someone say “Black hat”.
In my head, I was thinking ‘Really? This is news to me!’ I felt like running back to the office and telling the digital marketing team to pack up their desks. “Google doesn’t want us to optimise any more. We should all go home. Websites will work completely successfully all on their own, without our help”.
It’s not true, obviously, so let me clear this up. You may have heard of Hummingbird, an algorithm released in its first major incarnation in September 2013. Hummingbird (amongst other search engine algorithms) focuses on relevancy and quality of content. One of the reasons Hummingbird was released by Google was to make sure really relevant, high-quality content best-suited to real human consumption is displayed to users in search results. Hummingbird does this by understanding long-tail queries and in several other clever ways.
It is true that most black hat techniques are now dead. (The Wikipedia definition of Black Hat when relating to SEO is ‘Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception’) Google uses Panda (focusing on content and site quality), Penguin (an algorithm designed to filter out sites using dubious link building techniques) and other algorithms to weed out sites using questionable optimisation techniques. At Slightly Different, we have never utilised any of these techniques. We spend a great deal of our time helping to rectify and recover sites which have been penalised for using black hat techniques in the past.
When we manage SEO for a client, we are not trying to cheat Google. We are trying to help Google. More.
We ensure the site has clean code and no broken links or untidy redirects. We strive to achieve well structured websites with relevant, high quality meta data and structured markup. We consider usability and social integration. We also work very hard to ensure the content we create for our clients’ websites is content the site’s users want to read; Well written, well laid out on the page, content which is easy to absorb and engage with. We consider questions such as:
- Does this content answer the users’ questions?
- Are the supporting images and video relevant and interesting to the reader?
- Does the page content load quickly and in a sensible order?
- How can a user easily navigate to this content?
- Is the site responsive?
- Is the site fast to load on all devices?
- Does this site result in a good overall user experience?
These are all fairly simple, obvious questions but it takes time, forward planning, continued effort and constant monitoring to make sure a site is well ‘optimised’.
Some people may think that optimisation is dead, but as long as websites exist, I think it will be alive and necessary. At SD, all the sites we optimise sit high in the search results. They attract the right audience types and encourage great engagement.
Notice that I haven’t used the term ‘Keyword’ once? I do love a bit of keyword research though! Read more at Flying Circus!
