Hluska Talks Google Voodoo
When Stacey and I first started talking about going online, I decided that I was going to write about what I doing behind the scenes of this site. My goal was to write about my strategies and tactics in real time so that others could learn from my failures and successes. This site was going to become a repository of best practices and horrible comedies of errors.
This post is both a culmination and a beginning. The culmination of months of dreaming and planning and the beginning of (hopefully years) worth of material. The last few weeks have had rather similar impacts upon the world of search, so that is where I will begin. Search engines fascinate me. How can you type words into a big, stupid computer and get directed to sites that will teach you more about those words? For example, if I go to google.ca and type in ‘Regina’, I find that the first three entries are the Google Maps entry, the City of Regina home page and the city’s Wikipedia entry. I am into learning about how those three sites got to the top of that list.
Smart people call that ’search engine optimization’ and those with eyes towards branding like to brandiis the acronym ‘S.E.O.’. I think that search optimization lies somewhere between applied linguistics, an exercise in statistics, chess and voodoo. Sounds difficult, doesn’t it?
If taken to extremes, it can be, but I like to keep things simple. Search optimization is the art of relevance. It is the art of designing content in such a way that search engines will deem it worthy. And, the best way to design content for a search engine is to learn to think like a search engine. The best way to do that is with an analogy.
Imagine for a moment that you are writing a research project in a huge, poorly indexed library. How would you find the books you needed to write that paper? You would likely look at titles, ask people you trust, and flip through books to see if the content interests you and has the topics you are looking for. And that, my friends, is ultimately how search engines work.
That was more teaser than introduction, but I hope it taught you something. If you would like to learn more, keep watching this space or subscribe to our RSS feed. Best of luck.
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About Greg: Greg Hluska is an early 30s Regina guy. By day, he works in User Experience in a technology company and by night, he is an avid reader/writer who helps publish the Regina Streets Magazine. |
[...] I have tried to write something of an introduction to web site marketing. I tried to teach you how a search engine ‘thinks’, showed you the basic tools you can use to drive search traffic to your site, and wrote an article [...]