The Problem with Chasing Google
- Chasing Amy
- "When a guy meets a great girl, and loses her. Pride, fear & self doubt get in the way of him appreciating who he [was] with." And then he spends the rest of his life colored by emotionally trying to win her back even though there's no chance of success. --Urban Dictionary + Criss Ittermann
- Chasing Google
- "When a business gets their first website, fall in love with the idea of a quick fix, and then they lose sight of their customers. Pride, fear & self doubt get in the way of them appreciating and paying attention to who their customers really are. They're blinded by all the opportunity in front of them to gain customers because they're too busy chasing Google, and you can't catch Google." -- Criss Ittermann
The Problem with Chasing Google
Welcome to the web, the new frontier of the Information Age. Businesses discovered, and greedily devoured, the Internet starting between 1994-1996 and the years since have led to a fierce, lawless, anarchistic culture of cutthroat competition for business.
Enter Google
Then a new sheriff came to town: Google. Google's search engine gained enormous popularity with users, and some people took it upon themselves to guess, test, theorize, hack, explore, or trick Google's search engine algorithms so that they could do more business. It became "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) but most of what it really meant was "How can I fool Google into thinking I'm more important than I really am?"
Google responded to the rising chaos and backstabbing bone-crushing competition between businesses by constantly changing their methods for determining two things:
- Who are the cheaters? (beat them down!)
- What is Real Content? (raise them up!)
All their work on their search engine has revolved around serving real people (and data collection, but that's another can of worms) while avoiding cheaters.
Routine Bashing
This leads to Google rolling out big changes to their search engine algorithms specifically targeted at penalizing and catching cheaters. They're on a never-ending quest to identify REAL content for REAL people, and beating down people who try to trick them into boosted ratings.
If you cheat, you will eventually fail -- or spend tons of time staying on top of tricks, trends, making corrections, and hoping Google doesn't catch you with your pants down and send your website down to the millionth page.
The Solution
Write REAL content for REAL people.
That's not to say "don't use keywords" or "don't create content around a specific theme" -- but think about this:
What good is it if you have a page ranked high on "The Miracle Widget" if the page isn't sexy and attractive and enticing to the potential customer? If you make a webpage to appeal to a robot, you're going to lose the customer -- and that means you lose the game of SEO. If your webpage is purposefully loaded with keywords it won't read like a real human talking to a real human. It can't.
How to use Keywording
I research keywords only to determine search engine trending. If more people are looking for "Website Development" then I shouldn't say I do "Website Design" -- I'd want a whole article page on "website development" that explains my services, or tells people what to expect, how to prepare before their phone call, etc. I use the information as a free and fast focus-group tool: When people are looking for my services, what language do they use?
Then I want to use that language to create my REAL content.
Eclectic Tech can coach you on writing content, can help you determine what articles you should write, can help edit your writing so that it reads easily and in a friendly manner suitable for your website. In some cases, Eclectic Tech can provide ghostwriting services, too.
Your best way to get the attention of the search engines is to give people what they're really looking for.
I hope this helps!
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